Let me introduce myself, I'm Christiaan Blok. I'm a shooter and director from Sydney, Australia. For two years I've been using a hacked GH2 for my professional work. I've shot interviews, events, short films, corporate, training and commercial video. The GH2 has followed me down mines, up arctic mountains, onto race tracks, across beaches etc.. etc.. You get the idea... I've used it a lot! :-) So, as a little thank you to the hard working people behind the hacking scene I thought I'd post my experiences and conclusions after two years of testing and shooting.

THE RIG:

• PAL GH2. Shooting a mix of HBR & 24p. Shooting people, settings are generally SMOOTH -2 contrast, -2 sharpness, 0 Saturation & -2 NR. If no grading is going to happen or I'm shooting products I might bump up the sharpness & contrast a bit. I used NOSTALGIC for a while but found it added too much warmth to the image & highlights went funny. SMOOTH has nice roll-offs and good skin tones.

• 32GB Sandisk Class 10 Extreme HD Video 30MB/s SD cards for reliability. 2 of these make sure I have more than enough space for a day of shooting.

• Official Panasonic batteries for max battery life, compatibility & reliability of the battery meter.

• Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 & 42.5mm f/0.95 - two beautiful lenses. The 42.5mm's ability to go 'click-less' is a very nice feature.

• Tamron 18-50mm f/2.8 - a solid workhorse lens. Fully open and wide, this lens is a bit soft but it gets better around the 24mm mark onwards, stopped down a little. The short focus throw makes focusing a little tricky. Not knowing my exact f/stop is a bit annoying. My Novoflex adapter had issues connecting so I use a cheapo ebay adapter with iris control. This is the lens I use when I don't have time to use primes.

• 50mm f/1.8 Nikon E-Series - the lens I used before I got the Voigtlander 42.5mm f/0.95. A great interview & portrait lens. Very forgiving on facial features. Dirt cheap. Here's a shoot using this lens and the Sanity hack: http://www.cblok.com.au/portfolio/promotional-video/

• 100mm f/2.8 Nikon E-Series. A bit soft but it gets me out of trouble when I need some more zoom.

• Custom Gini Rig: 2 x arm mounts, a follow focus and 1 x handle. The follow focus on this item is very, very good - BUT HUGE! I attach handles & a shoulder mount when I need it.

• Zoom H4N recorder for audio

• LN2MIC-ZMGH-MON cable for syncing audio from H4N to GH2 & monitoring. Set the headphone output of the H4N to 64, the input level on the GH2 to level 2 AND make sure you've installed the Pasadena Pulse Audio v2 beta patch which gives increased flexibility and quality with audio levels and recording.

• Good headphones to monitor - I use the Sennheiser HD280 pro

• Carbon Miller DS20 Solo. A solid, light, beautifully smooth tripod.

• Small HD DP6 monitor for focus - the colour is always a bit off though.

THE HACKS:

For me to use a hack it must be ROCK STABLE. If it fails unexpectedly I never use it again. For this reason I only use:

• Sanity 5 with Pasadena Pulse Audio v2 beta
• Flowmotion 2.02 with Pasadena Pulse Audio v2 beta.

Sanity is my workhorse - super long record times, good quality, very reliable. Anything that is time limited or I've only got 1 x shot at, Sanity is used.

Flowmotion is if I want to push quality higher eg: on a short film or larger production with more time to set up.

THE TESTS:

Driftwood Seaquake: My first hacked shoot was with Driftwood's SeaQuake 24p. File sizes were huge, recording time was limited to 4 mins & my editor complained about the files being tricky to process due to their off the charts bitrates. My editor also mentioned that grading was tricky - the image seemed to fall apart easily. Visually, the results were outstanding, however the usability of this hack was it's limiting factor. Here's the shoot, we used the 25mm Voigtlander f/0.95 lens & a single 2K:

http://www.cblok.com.au/portfolio/short-film/

Driftwood Quantum x v4b Orion CBR (HBR): I used this hack for a while on corporate shoots. For the shoots I was doing (interviews), the large file sizes seemed unnecessary. This hack failed on me a few times with grass and trees so it was scrapped.

Driftwood Quantum x Orion v4d Dark Matter + HBR Fix CBR, Driftwood Quantum x v3 rocket RC 100+M, Driftwood Sedna Q20, Driftwood Span My Bitch Up v2b

All of the above hacks failed on me on HBR, generally on grass and trees.

Sanity 5 with Pasadena Pulse Audio v2 Beta:

This hack has generally been rock solid. The only times it has failed have been situations which the creator had already warned of. That is:

• Shooting EX-Tele. Often it works, however times where there is a lot of movement it may fail. For example, I was shooting off a boat using EX-Tele. The mix of Tele-EX & lots of moving water caused constant fails.

• Shooting using very high ISO. Generally I stick between 160-1600 ISO. Over 2000 ISO is gets a big dodgy. The night sequences of the shoot below caused constant fails due to high movement & high ISO - we wanted it grainy though. We used the Voigtlander 25mm 0.95 & LED lights.

http://www.theengineroomproject.com/portfolio/serenity/

Flowmotion v2.02 with Pasadena Pulse Audio v2 beta:

When I want more information in the high and low-lights, more room for grading & finer grain I use this patch. Generally pretty stable, I like how it handles low-light and my editor mentioned that grading was much better. Here's a test we shot that had TONNES of highlights which generally held together:

http://www.theengineroomproject.com/portfolio/someone-has-a-problem/

The above was shot with the NOSTALGIC setting - again, I'm not too happy with how this setting treats skin tones and highlights, but the hack held together well.

As for low-light - this film was shot with SMOOTH & the Flowmotion patch and worked very nicely: http://www.cblok.com.au/portfolio/short-film-3/ It's a shame I can't post the entire film as it's doing festival circuits at the moment.

So that's my experience and over-all workflow with this camera. Its been a great little camera, but I do often miss proper ENG style ergonomics - not to mention, built in ND filters! If anyone has any questions about what I mentioned, I'll try and answer them in batches.

Cheers.