How to Hack the GH2: my experience

[Ryan E. Walters]

Thanks for amending the bill of rights! Still waiting for my media. So you've never encountered it where the image on the screen suddenly gets magnified and there's a green square and a yellow marker indicating which portion of the screen is being magnified? I've been looking at a couple of GH2 guide books, but I'm not sure if I'll be wasting money.

Aah, I never posted this!

Oh well, my media arrived but now the site is saying new ptools 3.64 is required for the latest Driftwood X hack? Any idea where that is? I checked PView, but there doesn't seem to be a link.

I've seen the screen get magnified with the yellow square, but never suddenly out of my control. Only when I evoke the magnify function ...

I've never used a GH2 guide book, so I can't comment directly, but they all seem to be reasonably priced.

I've added a bit of clarification to my instructions about the updates to PTools - see the note at the bottom. Unfortunately, the website where you get the download is not super clear about this, but the link does give you the latest version of PTools.

 

[stoneinapond]

So you've never encountered it where the image on the screen suddenly gets magnified and there's a green square and a yellow marker indicating which portion of the screen is being magnified?

If this is happening without you touching anything, then you have a faulty camera. That is a playback function for stills, but you have to press a button and then rotate the thumb wheel to activate the function. Pretty hard to do by accident, but not impossible.

 

[Ryan E. Walters]

They speak a different language on Personal view, man! Q? Death charts and 6080808 what? Death Stars and Jedi prestidigitation!
Is there a glossary for dummies on there somewhere??

Yep- and that was my main frustration with hacking the camera. I'm sure it all seems obvious to them- how could it not be? Right? Well, all their talk went over my head, especially when it came to how to hack it on the mac. As far as I know of there isn't a glossary for dummies. While I'm no software engineer, the things that they are talking about essentially boil down to how many bits are being used to record each frame and how those bits get distributed within the frame, and what bits get thrown out between frames.

The most basic, and VERY OVER SIMPLISTIC way of understanding it, is this: bigger is better. What I recommend, is reading through a couple of the descriptions of the hacks, picking out 2 - 5 you want to try, and then test them out on the same subject, across multiple subjects. Then take the footage back and evaluate it. This is where you will actually see how much better / more you will get out of each hack. While bigger is "probably" technically better, does that extra data actually translate to a visible difference on screen, or is it just extra data and processing. And that is something that you have to figure out by testing it for yourself ...

 

[dtzfilms]

Yep- and that was my main frustration with hacking the camera. I'm sure it all seems obvious to them- how could it not be? Right? Well, all their talk went over my head, especially when it came to how to hack it on the mac. As far as I know of there isn't a glossary for dummies. While I'm no software engineer, the things that they are talking about essentially boil down to how many bits are being used to record each frame and how those bits get distributed within the frame, and what bits get thrown out between frames.

The most basic, and VERY OVER SIMPLISTIC way of understanding it, is this: bigger is better. What I recommend, is reading through a couple of the descriptions of the hacks, picking out 2 - 5 you want to try, and then test them out on the same subject, across multiple subjects. Then take the footage back and evaluate it. This is where you will actually see how much better / more you will get out of each hack. While bigger is "probably" technically better, does that extra data actually translate to a visible difference on screen, or is it just extra data and processing. And that is something that you have to figure out by testing it for yourself ...

Thanks Ryan. I'm on a Mac Book Pro with 4GB of RAM. I'm getting stutter playback with the driftwood v9b on H and on L when I ingest into FCP 6. Do I need more RAM or a new graphics card. My Laptop is the version just before Thunderbolt. OSX, 10.6.8, 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7.

That magnification thing hasn't happened in a while, but I wish I'd known it was a malfunction due to faulty camera before hacking. It hasn't happened with the hack though, so I wonder.

 

[dtzfilms]

If this is happening without you touching anything, then you have a faulty camera. That is a playback function for stills, but you have to press a button and then rotate the thumb wheel to activate the function. Pretty hard to do by accident, but not impossible.

Cheers, no I was on movie function, I believe, 24P Cinema. I'll keep plugging away though, see if it still happens.

 

[Ryan E. Walters]

Thanks Ryan. I'm on a Mac Book Pro with 4GB of RAM. I'm getting stutter playback with the driftwood v9b on H and on L when I ingest into FCP 6. Do I need more RAM or a new graphics card. My Laptop is the version just before Thunderbolt. OSX, 10.6.8, 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7.

That magnification thing hasn't happened in a while, but I wish I'd known it was a malfunction due to faulty camera before hacking. It hasn't happened with the hack though, so I wonder.

If you are still on FCP 6, then going with more RAM would be the smarter choice. The AVC codec takes a lot more processing power- which is what is slowing down your system. From what I remember, FCP 6 doesn't take advantage of the graphics card, so upgrading that will not do much for you in FCP 6. And I'm not sure how much of an option it really is to upgrade the graphics card in a Mac Book Pro anyway ... The best option, if you are going to keep with FCP, is to go with iMovie Pro, I mean FCP-X and a new graphics card. As FCP-X does take advantage of the graphics card. [Just as a frame of reference, I have always been a hard core apple guy who has used FCP since version 01, and I recently switched over to premiere about 6 months ago, although I still use FCP 7 from time to time.]