Hello First,sorry for my bad englisch. I have try to do my own test,stock vs hacked firmware,because on the most pictures i cant see better quality. To compare flow water under different light,or moving trees and leafs, are very hard to see and find the better picture.So i have "create" my own scene to test picturequality. here my result.stock-sanity5-flow 2.02-cluster5.1

now i can see the better quality,flow2.02 and cluster5.1 looks very good. bye

Cheers for the responses - I think I'll keep the GH2 for family vids and rent cams for paid gigs from here on in (thanks bwhitz I'll try the Orion patch for slow motion). I've had too many weird things happening (particularly rolling shutter after a few hours shooting) on last big paid gig with a hacked GH2. Ive also got a notcieable shift in colour when I hit record which I never had on the GH1. Don't get me wrong I love this little cam and it can get incredible images but it is a little unreliable for me.

@chad78

Ive got a shoot coming up tommorrow in which I might use the GH2 for slow motion and am seriously considering going back to unhacked as the tests I ran today showed no considerable difference in quality.

I've been using Orion for a while now and the 60fps 720p is superb in that patch. Run it, and if you still don't see a difference then... I dunno... just use an iphone or something. I doubt a camera like the GH2 would be any help to your production if the difference between stock 60fps and the hacked patches aren't immediately jumping out at you.

@questech

but I was a DP many years ago and also owned a software development business, and an electronics manufacturing business, so I am fascinated by this stuff.

+1

I've noticed a direct relationship to the technical information I know, to my creative freedom. It's great to learn everything!

Interesting thread. I bought a GH1 when it was first released - found a good stable hack and was quite happy with it. I have however become less and less convinced that these hacks (I have a GH2 now) are all they are all they are made out to be. Sadly most of the 'test' footage I've watched leaves a lot to be desired and it seems folks are too busy testing/debating the 'latest' patches to actually go out and shoot some decent films. Ive got a shoot coming up tommorrow in which I might use the GH2 for slow motion and am seriously considering going back to unhacked as the tests I ran today showed no considerable difference in quality. By the way I have been running a hacked GH2 for about 6 months and today was the first time I went unhacked. Ive also ran into some really weird intermittent issues on hacked GH2 (particularly increased rolling shutter/skew/jello) that Ive noticed in a lot of test videos. Just my two cents (and if anyone can recommend a proven slow motion hack that is heads and shoulders above stock please feel free to share! My mind's not completely closed yet!)

http://www.peacockvisuals.com

Hi

Yes, because of this journey I have a new insight :-)

My DP is a technical wizard and knows every aspect of the equipment we use at work, so I don't normally have to delve into this stuff, but I was a DP many years ago and also owned a software development business, and an electronics manufacturing business, so I am fascinated by this stuff.

Thanks for all of your support!!

Hey Guys, I'm blown away with the information in this thread. I understand my GH2 Way better than ever before.

And the breakdown of which settings affect the various aspects of our shooting will help me in my next quest, which is to test action scenes.

Thank you all!

I think one thing some of us on this forum need to keep in mind is that many of us have had months to get to know exactly what the different hack settings will and will not do, even as new settings pop-up at a very rapid rate.

@questech's original belief that the hack would result in increased noise reduction isn't an unreasonable one. I think a lot of people may mistakenly come in with that preconception until they start reading up and testing it. His post in this forum is a continuation and he went back and re-tested based on our discussions on the former, so kudos to him for making the effort.

Let's be clear on this: most hacked settings are NOT designed to increase noise reduction, they are designed to preserve more detail. That means that if you do more noise reduction in post, you should have a much easier time with high noise footage than before. If you do not do noise reduction in post, you may find that you have both more detail and more noise in your footage, depending on the scene shot and the setting used.

As I mentioned in the other thread, the key to getting the most out of the hacks tends to be to find a deficiency in the stock settings and look for a setting to address that.

Low-light noise isn't rendering with the motion or detail you want? CM Night is one setting that can really help that. As of my testing at the time of its release, I found it unmatched by any other setting in that area.

The Group Of Pictures (GOP) setting is spaced too wide for you? Use a GOP1 setting to make sure that each frame is rendered individually.

Image quality drastically decreases when there is higher motion in the scene? Most of the hacked settings address this to varying degrees and it is a good place to see the difference.

Image quality seems to be getting lost to macroblocking in a scene with high detail? Use a setting optimized for greater detail, like Sedna, GOLGOP, Flowmotion, etc.

Image quality seems to break apart during grading? Try a hacked setting with a higher bitrate.

These are some of the sorts of situations where the difference is easiest to notice. If you aren't pushing the stock codec (for instance if the scene has low noise, a not very demanding dynamic range, low detail and no motion) you are unlikely to notice any difference, especially if you are not grading.

I would be suggesting specific settings more but 1) I have more experience with Driftwood and Ralph_B settings than the others and don't want to be too unfair and 2) there have been a LOT of new settings or updated settings released recently. I would like to stress that Driftwood's settings are not the only high quality settings available - I just really like the look of GOP1 and he makes more of those settings than the other authors.

Okay, so that's my 2 cents. Most of it is a repeat of what I said before, but hopefully it is still helpful to some people. :)

Quite possibly THE most informative page I've seen ANYWHERE about the GH2 Hack, cheers guys !

Different settings affect different aspects of image quality. If you only test static scenes you are effectively ignoring one of the most important aspects of video – that is, motion. Many settings – particularly low GOP ones – address the fidelity of motion and aren’t intended to improve the fidelity of static subjects. Other settings (i.e. long GOP ones) are intended to maximize the quality of static subjects. In no particular order, here are some of my findings concerning settings:

The factory settings for 24p1080 produce a maximum I frame size of about 900K Bytes. The most I’ve seen produced by any setting comes to about 1180K Bytes. That’s an increase of a little over 30% - a modest, but significant increase. I frames effectively set the maximum IQ of a clip.

When frame size is increased everything is rendered with better fidelity – including noise.

The “look” of video can be changed by modifying quantization table entries. Basically, one can trade off how much fine detail (little, busy parts of the image) is rendered for smoothness, and vice versa.

Motion is rendered perfectly with GOP 1 settings – the tradeoff is that the maximum frame size is necessarily smaller, which results in lower IQ for static subjects.

If motion rendering isn’t important to you (e.g. you are shooting relatively static or slow moving subjects) there is little to be gained by using a setting that is over 32Mb. If you take the ratio of the maximum frame size with factory settings (900KB) to the maximum possible frame size (1180KB) you get 1:1.31. If you apply that ratio to the factory bitrate (24Mb) you get 24 * 1.31 = 31.47. That’s pretty close to 32Mb.

It’s very hard to determine the fidelity of motion rendering by examining individual frames. Even if frames look fine, that doesn’t mean they are an accurate representation of the actual subject at that particular moment in time. Sometimes individual frames can look fine, but when the clip is examined in motion things just don’t look quite right in ways that are hard to quantify (I don’t mean the obvious stuff – like stuttering).

24Mb is a fairly respectable bitrate for 24p/1080 AVC video – achieving a large percentage of potential quality. All these settings are arguably addressing potential improvements within the realm of diminishing returns – you’ll not see dramatic improvement, rather you’ll see incremental improvements. Also, when final output is rendered for, say Vimeo, these improvements will probably be almost invisible. Now, if you are doing a lot of grading, doing slow motion, etc… - anything that demands maximum image quality, the improvements offered by good settings will become much more apparent.

Also - what Lee Powell said...

Chris

I Second That!

@TGDude

The real answer is that it is easy to show clips where you can’t tell any difference at all and it is just as easy to show clips where the differences are very apparent. It all just depends on what you are shooting and what you hope to get out of it.

The hack definitely has its place. You just have to know what each different group of settings is intended for. For the most part just doubling the bit rate will produce results that the average user could not possibly distinguish from the highest bit rate hacks. That is why we have the No Adverse Affects settings.

If you have to ask which settings you should use without telling us anything about what you want to improve then the No adverse Affects settings will give you the quality you seek with all of the reliability of the stock firmware.

However, if you know that you are going to pull the footage to extreme levels or if you are going to be filming a scene where the entire frame is in motion(Like running water) then the settings that Llpowell and driftwood have produced will give you the results you desire.

The only thing that gets me is when someone uses an extreme setting and then complains that it had write errors for them and they can’t see any difference when they post it on youtube. If you really know that you need that level of bit rate then you need to be ready to Pony up for the recommended memory cards as well. And you also better be doing more with it than just sharing it on youtube or you are probably just wasting your money.

So many people just blindly go into this asking “What settings produce the best quality”. Instead you should be asking yourself what settings will suite my needs the best.

Hey Guys,

Thanks again for the replies!

First off, Ian_T, I apologize if you think that was meant for you, I was speaking in generalities, so other than my comment about your suggestion that I read more :) I was just trying to make a point.

Again My tests were limited to this static scene, and I am not disputing that there may be some benefits to hacking the firmware, I just haven't seen had the need to yet from everything that I have read vs everything that I have watched.

I use high end cameras in my business, so this is my first try at this type of camera. I really just purchased it to do YouTube videos using a green screen. I was just not expecting the noise to be this bad because the reviews made it sound really good. After seeing the noise (maybe I'm admittedly a little picky) I was prompted to start this quest.

I mistakenly thought that a hack might fix what Panasonic neglected, but I didn't know enough at the time i.e. that a hack wasn't going to change the what the sensor was doing. I originally thought that the hacks were changing the internal programing that affected the DSP and could modify the way the camera dealt with the information from the sensor.

I dig the camera and will eventually get the free time to move it around a bit, maybe at a tennis match so that I can experience the difference between the hacked and unhacked firmware.

So anyway these test results were strictly to see if any of the hacks would perform better than the stock firmware in ETC mode. I have a lens that I really like that requires ETC mode.

What frustrates me though is that I have watched a lot of video of hacked firmware, and upon close inspection, I see a lot of blotching that looks like little blurry swarms and other artifacts. I guess my expectations exceeded what this little camera could do, especially when many tout how good it is when hacked.

But don't get me wrong, I like the camera and will just have to use it within it's limitations.

Thanks Again !!!