Currently we are using Apocalypse Now 444, soft matrix.

I'm confused and surprised that a card rated up to 95mb/s is crashing with a hack that is at 44mb/s??? Has anyone else experienced this? It also crashes on my older Transcend Class 10 16GB cards but not that much more frequently. Completely lame given the cost differential between these two cards.

I'm considering reverting back to baseline, but nervous to do so in the middle of a shoot (the vanilla hack was my first hack on the GH2 so this is still new to me). For now I'm working around it. Any advice or thoughts are appreciated.

I created the video below to show new users how to update their Panasonic GH2 with the new customizable version 1.1 settings using Ptool. The intent is to get new users to try the extremely stable settings first so that they don't jump right into extreme settings that their memory cards can't handle.

Hopefully, this will reduce the number of threads that are created that say something like "Why won't XXXXX Settings Work For Me"? The settings used in the video will work with any card in any situation. Once they play with those settings then they can move on to other settings once they have decided what they want to get out of the camera and how much they are willing to spend on faster memory cards.

No adverse affects settings http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/953/gh2-patch-vault-most-popular-patches-in-one-place#Item_5

I got a Panasonic GF2 and have some trouble with the analog video output. I want to use the output to preview video during recording. I already found that you can enable the live output by pressing Q.MENU for some seconds. This works fine for capturing stilts, but if you start recording a video, the output shows only black as long as you record the video. After stopping recording, you have normal output again.

I think this is just a firmware restriction that can be removed! Any suggestions?

And I really need the analog output all the time, because I want to operate the camera remotecontrolled and get the preview via an analog video transmitter.

Other discussion about this issue: http://www.aplanding.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5179

Regards

Igor

Is it possible to make a "hack" menu for GH2, something like a standalone menu category, where all of the cheats, shutter speeds, AOVs, guide numbers and all of those things may be "written down"?

Yes, no?

:D

just got back here after a long while. i'm resurrecting my GF1 after losing Gh2 from carjackers. haven't used the GF1 for a long time hence i dropped in here searching for the updates. but i was out for a year or so and coming back in pview i think i'm i a maze. anyways, kindly point me to a link to the latest ptool and firmare for the GF1. thank you.

It's been around a Year I signed in here for the very first time. So now, after many test shoots, I'm planning to choose GH2 for the next film project.

Film is about 85 minute long documentary. Films shooting style is mainly situation-based documentary (Cinéma Vérité aka Direct Cinema) with some "cinematic scenes". So some of the scenes are classic documentary and some more stylistic - fiction like - with lightning crew, dolly, directed action etc.

These situation-based events I'm going to shoot with GH2 attached to the Steadicam Pilot. And yes, no interviews. This means I don't have very long takes.

I really like Lee's Flow Motion v2 and Nick's Sedna (AQ1-A) or Cluster v6&7. These I've tested quite a lot. What I'm looking for is best combination in detail and in fluid motion (motion rendering - no strobo effect). And of course hacks reliability is a virtue too! =D

So does anyone has any extra pointers about taking a project to Big Screen? Or if You think there is superior Hack for this kind of project - please don't hesitate to speak out.

Thanx and all the Best, MisterJ

All I need is the cleanest rendition of human movement, and only at 720p. I have GH2, second system sound, Panny 25/1.4, CV 12/5.6 on adapter, and Lumix 14/2.5, ancillary gear.

I have watched footage from Sanity, Driftwood, and others; I would very much like other's input on this. The camera will only be used for video; I shoot other gear for stills. TIA, KL

1. Sedna aq1 (for being an epic legend)

2. Intravenous / Moon (this is a tie for now until I do more testing with moon. Intrav. has the best looking noise IMO)

3. Apoc Now Cluster 7 Sharp 2

4. Cluster v8 DREWnet

5. Quantum 9b

honorable mention: sanity 5.1

Also, if you want to explain what or why you like that setting, feel free. It is really hard to pick favorites, but If I had only 5 to pick from, it would probably be these.

I would make this "top 10" but I wanted to force people to pick the settings they REALLY like. Feel free to update your list as testing continues ; )

@driftwood, I'm especially curious to know what your top 5 would be, if it's even possible for you to decide. lol

I'm sure that someone's written a good outline of how the patches work. Explaining what higher bitrates do. Explaining what matrices are, and how they affect the footage. Explanations of what "intraframe" means. Something that I can read, understand, and use that understanding to evaluate the patches. Does such an outline exist?

While I cannot see yet an immediate beneficial use of my results, I thought that they may inspire other experiments or just add to the knowledge of the GH2 internals.

At first I wanted to know what precisely a GH2 writes to my 64GB SDXC card when doing the usual "Format" before use. The answer:

The GH2 creates a DOS-style partition table containing one primary partition that starts at an offset of exactly 32768 sectors (of 512 byte, each), or 16MB. This seems like a reasonable choice to me, as it makes sure the start of the filesystem is aligned to a 2^N byte offset that is almost certain to be a multiple of the erase block size of the MLC NAND flash memory that SD cards commonly consist of. The type ID of the primary partition is set to 7, a value used by Windows for NTFS as well as exFAT (and also for HPFS with OS/2, which may rest in peace). (Notice that with SD and SDHC cards, partition type 0xb is used, which is common for use with FAT file systems.) The unused 16MB before the first partition start may also help (when never having been written to) the SD card internal Flash controller and its wear level management to prepare completely empty erase blocks for writing. (NAND Flash can be read and written to when empty in small blocks such as 512 byte, but erasing NAND Flash memory is possible only in much larger "erase blocks" - such as 512k to 4MB - so the controllers in SD cards, USB sticks or SSDs need to employ some sector allocation management of their own to make sure they can erase blocks of that size before new data can be written.)

The GH2 writes an exFAT filesystem to the primary partition with the following characteristics:

• Volume serial number: A seemingly random number that changes with each format
• exFat filesystem version: 1.0
• Sector size: 512
• Cluster size: 131072
• First sector: 32768 (consistent with the start of the partition)
• FAT first sector: 16384
• FAT sectors count: 16384
• First cluster sector: 32768
• Root directory cluster: 4
• Volume state: 0x0000
• FATs count: 1
• Drive number: 0x80
• Label: (none, empty)

This is the same filesystem layout that results if you format the partition using e.g. the following Windows command line (replacing X: with your actual drive letter):

format X: /FS:exFAT /Q /A:128k

The GH2 writes a directory structure and some files to the initialized exFAT filesystem:

size name
     0 DCIM/
     0 MISC/
     0 PRIVATE/
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/PLAYLIST/
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/CLIPINF/
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/
 504 PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/INDEX.BDM
   66 PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/MOVIEOBJ.BDM
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/AVCHDTN/
   72 PRIVATE/AVCHD/AVCHDTN/THUMB.TID
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/AVCHDTN/THUMB.TDT
     0 PRIVATE/AVCHD/IISVPL/
607776 PRIVATE/FILEINFO.TBL
   76 PRIVATE/FILEMNG.DAT
1672 PRIVATE/cache.dat

If you archive this directory structure on a computer of yours, you can re-create a "blank" SDXC card for use with the GH2 at any time, just by creating the same filesystem type and copying these files to it. I tested that indeed, the GH2 behaves completely normal if you use a card prepared such, indistinguishable from an "original in-camera formatting".

Now I wanted to know whether changing any aspects of this "formatting" would yield interesting results, and indeed, it does.

First, I checked whether the offset of the first partition does make a difference to the GH2 when changed. Doubling or halving this offset didn't change anything, the GH2 seemed not to take notice of the difference.

Next, I checked what would happen if I used a different allocation unit size, e.g. 256kB or 64kB. Such change causes the GH2 to display a warning when inserting the SDXC card, saying (as far as I can remember the wording): "This card has not been formatted with this camera. It will not be suitable for recording video." After displaying this message for a few seconds, the camera behaves normally regarding the taking of still pictures. When starting to shoot video, it first seems that all is normal, too, but whatever allocation unit size different from 128kB I tried, video recording will stop after a few seconds with the well known error message that "the cards write speed is insufficient". This happenes even when recording low-bandwidth video, so I wonder what special meaning the 128kB allocation unit size has for the GH2 that it is working so badly with other sizes.

Notice that when I benchmark writing to the same card from my PC with allocation unit sizes other than 128kB (within reasonable limits), I do not measure significantly different performance. But of course, the SD card interface of the GH2 may be very different from the Kingston USB 3.0 card reader that I use with my PC.

Well, that's about it with my experiments on this, so far.

BTW: The "SD Formatter" offered at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/ claims that it has one mode of operation where it pre-erases the Flash memory on the card, which would plausibly allow for faster writing, but only until all the blocks have been written to at least once. I also wonder under which circumstances this tool is able to issue the ERASE_WR_BLK_START/_END etc. SD protocol messages to a SDXC card that is connected via a card reader, the documentation of the formatter indicates that the tool falls back to just overwriting the blocks if it cannot erase them - but just overwriting blocks would not leave the card with empty erase blocks, so subsequent writes would require erase operations by the cards internal controller, resulting in no write performance benefit.

http://www.cineplus.ch/cinema.html

Thanks!

For my next music video project I'll be shooting scenes in 60p which will be processed using twixtor to emulate approximate speeds between 500-1000fps.

I have invested in some SanDisk Extreme Pro 95 MB/s cards and I've searched around similar threads but most other posters are using slower cards.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has had experience shooting with these cards and if anyone can give recommendations for the best hack to use in this instance. I would like to push the cards to their upper limit without sacrificing stability.

Some of the shots I have in mind will contain large amounts of detail - splashing water, dust, etc so the higher the bit rate the better. They will all almost all be locked off frames.

Other posters have suggested the Flowmotion 2.02 is good for this purpose but the bitrate maxes out at 95 MB/s for this patch and if possible I'd like to make the most of the cards' capabilities and record at a higher bitrate. Will I be able to use one of Driftwood's 176MB/s patches? Does anyone have any experience shooting at 60p with these?

Are there other factors that I need to consider here to ensure the best workflow through twixtor?

Thanks JB

Is it still Canis Majora series? Or is it Apocalypse now or 444 or GH3onaGH2?

Anyone give a short answer? I know its complicated, but I just want the most detailed image, file size be damned (I have plenty of 64gb sandisk ultra cards). Reliability and playback also secondary to simply the best image quality.