GH1 Would you trust the GH1 for non-attended wedding recording?

D

DevonH

Well-known member
As I work on lining up a few small wedding gigs starting next June I'm considering whether or not I should use my GH1 for my wide-shot b-cam. My GH2 will serve perfectly on my monopod during the ceremony and for creating the "cinema" short of the wedding, but I'm nervous about setting the GH1 at the back, pressing record, walking away, and trusting it for the length of the ceremony, especially since I'll want to apply a hack to it.

Has anyone done this? I'm considering selling the GH1 and picking up an used HMC150, but naturally I'd enjoy saving 2k. The HMC150 is a wonderful camera, and I have no doubt it'd serve me well.
 
I have done this. Not a wedding but a theater show, which lasted for 100minutes or so.

hack it and remove the time limit and you´re set, in general.

But: disable AF and stop down if you can. with or without hack, low light is not the GH1´s strong suite. not at all!! by actively stopping down a bit, you at least avoid banding (8bit banding and fixed pattern noise aswell)... and then, to not have pure blacks in delivery, insert some noise!

Besides that, just set it up, hit record and relax.
 
JackBayer said:
...hack it and remove the time limit...
Click to expand...

Devon - Jack is right if you have an EU model. North American and Asian models have unlimited record times out of the box. You may want to hack it for other reasons, but, unless you're in Europe, removing the time limit should not be one of them.

Cheers,

Bill
 
I had my own settings around 60Mbit as upper limit. But I haven´t touched it since almost half a year, hackwise. So there are a few very well tested hack settings available. For production safety I´d go with this one by Ipowell. He has also higher hacks in his signature, if you want to test them out.

One thing though: If hacked, the remaining record time indicator is off. It shows numbers in minutes and seconds, kind of, but they count down faster than real time. just a heads up.
 
I've used my GH1 to record static wide shots from about 50 to 105 minutes at a time, and never had a freeze or record failure.
If it's a really crisp and highly detailed scene, just make sure that it can record a couple of minutes stably beforehand, without reporting the dreaded "... speed limitation ..." error. Should be fine, as long as the ceremony isn't being held in a pine forest!
Using the widest acceptable aperture helps to increase the recording stability by blurring some of the scene, thus decreasing what I call the "detail stress".

Install the best quality patch you can (e.g. 100mbps), and bring along a back-up SD card with a fail-safe patch (like the 40 or 75) just in case you get errors.
 
warning Will Robinson!!

hack the camera but test it thoroughly 1st - I've used a mild hack and left the back camera unattended for 30-40 weddings without a problem but I'm now having major issues - I suspect it may be the latest version of Ptools but I don't know. Test it 1st to make sure it spans and test it with foliage or the pappas chart
 
Either use the lpowell high reliability or my specially deigned Event patch for file spanning. Stock is safest, of course.
 
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