GH2 Hack version up'd very quickly

johnnyk

johnnyk

Active member
Hey.
So I finally got around to hacking my GH2 with Driftwood's Orion v4b. Got everything on the SD card, popped her in the camera and selected yes to version up. It took less than 5 minutes. Did I do this wrong? I know there are no menu indications that you've changed the firmware, but everywhere I've read about this process makes a note to warn hackers to have a fully charged battery before installing. Curious if anyone else had a similar experience.

staring sideways at my camera,
johnnyk
 
No, but always use a fully charged battery. I installed the 44 mbs hack and now I only get a 13:37 time record.
Anybody else run into this situation.l
 
5 minutes is normal. The full battery has something to do with the camera requirement for a full battery prior to upgrading I believe, not that the upgrade takes a long time.

Enjoy the hack!
 
how much recording time should you get per gig normally on a unhacked camera? wanting to know to be sure mine is hacked correctly.
 
There's nothing wrong with your camera. From the sounds of it everything went fine.

As far as how much time you get on a card....it will always depend on the type of hack you use. If for example you are using a hack that runs at 150 Mbps then depending on the size card you have it's easy to do the math and figure just how much (on average) you will have to record with. At 150Mbps it will eat away at your space much quicker than before.
 
tampawolf said:
how much recording time should you get per gig normally on a unhacked camera? wanting to know to be sure mine is hacked correctly.
Click to expand...
On mine (hacked with Driftwood's Orion V4b) I get almost 1 hour on a 64GB card. Painfully large files, but the quality is outstanding.
On the unhacked camera, that same card would hold close to 6 hours of footage.
 
Gundar, are you saying that I should remove the hack and live with the 24MB/s factory setting? If I may ask, why the inconsistancy for record times. Could it be the sensor is heating up and it stop recording as a protection measure? Thank you.
 
The reason you ALWAYS use a Panasonic fully charged battery is because you can brick your GH2 - meaning the firmware update happens, the battery dies and your battery is a fancy paper weight - which you can turn back into a GH2 by sending it back to Panasonic, ask Keylight for advice if this happens. Firmware update (hacking) takes less than 5 minutes yes.

As for the recording times of the hacks, it is difficult to determine since there are a few versions of some patches (pre-set settings) available. On top of that, if I understand the Cake hack correctly, depending on what you are actually filming, the time you can record on the same card can vary - film a blank wall gives you more footage than filming a soccer match for example - if I understand that patch correctly.

P.S. The GH2 doesn't suffer from overheating under normal climatic conditions. Some have experienced that the camera stopped recording and could only record again after the camera was switched off and on if I remember correctly.
 
EDRAKEL said:
Gundar, are you saying that I should remove the hack and live with the 24MB/s factory setting? If I may ask, why the inconsistancy for record times. Could it be the sensor is heating up and it stop recording as a protection measure? Thank you.
Click to expand...

I would not say to remove the hack and revert. First, the record time remaining counter is not accurate after you hack the camera, if that's what you're going by, at least in my experience. The camera doesn't quite know what to make of the various bitrate tweaks we've made to it, so it somehow comes up with that number.

If that is the record time that you got when you recorded, that is the time that you got. When you hack the camera, it's saving much more of the raw data coming from the sensor, compressing it less. It therefore is going to mean that you have significantly, depending on the hack, less record time.

That is the sacrifice that we are making. Better quality, less compression efficiency.

As to the original poster, the time it took the firmware to update, 5 minutes, is correct. The full battery advice is just so you make ABSOLUTELY sure that the battery doesn't run out mid update. This is especially true for those that risk running the update off of a third party battery (I strongly recommend not doing that in any case) as it has no indicator.

Whenever I do it it is with a fully charged Panasonic authentic battery and I carefully set the camera down in the middle of a table so I don't press any buttons, or accidentally drop it or something.

Updating the firmware is something that was designed to happen once or twice in the lifetime of the camera, not once or twice a week. This is far and away the biggest risk of hacking your camera, IMO. Very few (none that I can remember) stories of cameras that were bricked by a successful patch. More than a few of cameras that lost power during the update process (one reason to not use the wall adapter for this process. Power goes out and you could be hosed).
 
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