Guys, step back and look at yourselves. It may help you to understand why releasing a new GH2 patch isn't Nick's highest priority at the moment. For which I don't blame him one bit.

Imagine for a moment that you're him. For the past few years, you've spent hundreds of hours researching and refining a whole family of firmware patches, herding a group of experienced beta testers, and what's more, you've done all of this extremely difficult and time-consuming work for free, allowing anyone to download it and enjoy the wholesale visual improvements it brings to the GH2.

Why did you put yourself through all that? Because you wanted to contribute to the community of aspiring filmmakers. The thing that pushed you every step of the way was the goal of putting true professional-level video capture in the hands of the next Scorcese. Making it easier for anyone with good ideas and taste to compete in the big leagues and change the face of cinema.

So after all that hard work, what did it get you? Spec shakycam HDR rap videos that look no better than if they'd been shot with a smartphone. Hours and hours of Vimeo backyard foliage. Slo-mo clips of girlfriends and/or children being followed around city streets, tourist attractions, and shabby backyards. Not to mention an infinite number of "tests" posted in these threads, years after the last patch was released, as if one more 30 second YouTube of people walking down the street adds any possible kind of useful data point to whatever ongoing development loop you guys somehow still think exists. Like Nick's following these threads every day, murmuring to himself, "What the devil?! I'm suddenly seeing matricing flaws in Moon T7 because of Wifebeater69LOL's downconverted SD Vimeo of his cat! Well done, Wifebeater69LOL! I must attack the problems immediately!"

And how do you suppose Driftwood feels about continuing (and by that I mean continuing to go on living at all) if you swung by these parts and saw:

"WAREZ MY GH4 HACKZ? I HAZ NO GH4 LOLZ BUT I AM NEED HACKZ CUZ BETTER HA!"

"Another DEADLINE MISSED, Driftwood? Tsk tsk. You ruined my Father's Day, I want you to know."

"Iz the hacked GH2 still usable? Cuz it am coming out 2 years ago and countless amazing looking films were shot over the past 50 years with cameras nowhere near as capable, but screw that, 2 years is ANCIENT HISTORY AND I HAZ THE ATTENTION SPAN OF A GENE-DAMAGED FRUIT FLY so shud I huck my now-useless GH2 in the river or am it make a good counterweight for my $900 Gini rig I boughted to stabilize my backyard test footage?"

Let's be frank. As far as the firmware hacks go, they stopped being "better" quite awhile ago. Once the patches got all-Intra and >70Mb/sec, significant visual improvement hit a plateau, despite the OMGITZSOMUCHBETTER auto-chorus that erupts 5 seconds after every new version drops. In a perfect world, Nick would release T8 and it would be the original GH2 firmware, and it wouldn't matter because all the yahoos would go nuts all over again and declare it the RED/Black Magic/etc. killa, long live the king, hellz yeah and so forth.

I admit, it was hugely entertaining that time Nick put out two versions of the patch, one with the standard 23.976 frame rate and the other with 24 fps, because then we got to guffaw at the amateurs crowing about how filmic "true 24p" looks, and the few pros left here face-palming, again. But really, it's time to wind this party down, my fellow as-yet-undiscovered filmmakers. If you really think there's room in that aging silicon for one more blow against the empire, I've got a $900 Gini rig to sell you.

Myself, I'm perfectly happy with both T7 and IV2, and I use both depending on the job - IV2 if I need baked footage with a film look for a quick turnaround, and T7 if I have the time to run it through Filmconvert and grade it exactly how I want it. But I was perfectly happy with SMBUP way back when flappers danced the Charleston atop biplane wings over the Atlantic.

The GH2 may no longer be in production but it's far from dead. It shoots circles around anything Canon's got out now, and makes tons more sense for the indie shooter than any of the BM cameras. If you can't afford a RED, you want a hacked GH2, full stop. I've been shooting the hell out of this camera and I'm in no more of a rush to replace it with the GH4 than I was to replace it with the GH3. Above a certain baseline of technical performance, the outcome depends on the shooter, not the camera, and even the stock GH2 lives comfortably above that baseline. If your profession requires 4K acquisition then good for you, but I'd wager that exactly zero of the folks here fall into that category, and that even the stock GH2 is ludicrous overkill for what anyone here's doing with a video camera.

So Nick, don't sweat this thread, or Moon T8 deadlines either, even if they were self-imposed. If I were you, I'd keep my eye on the ball of scoring some kind of real paying gig with Panasonic PR and forget about the hack scene.

And the rest of you? Wake up. The dream is over. The last hackable Lumix that was actually worth hacking rolled off the line years ago. Thanks for everything, Nick, and Vitaliy, and Chris Brandin, LPowell, all you guys who put your heads together and make these cameras better. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to move on.

"There seems to be a lot of confusion about what these higher bitrate hacks and different GOP lengths can do for the image quality" - that's what wrote many times here and unfortunately I proved right. Anyway...

About the plug-in: working on an algorithm inside which can generate and "glut" the picture of GH2 and other poor image cameras, so that it reaches much of what motion pictures have. It's quite hard and difficult process...

@Azo: Does your mind really allow you to think that all you wrote to me is something I've not been thinking about?!? What I wrote is not a matter of appreciation or critics, it's a question of information!!!

No one said Nick MUST do his work for me , for you, for all of us. So, don't distort my words!!!

Actually, everything costs its price, but some info is what has matter in my post. Just asked for info about changes and modifications of T8, even if that means it will be released on Christmas or later.

Crying begins to sound closer to being spoiled.

Guys, just be patient, most likely Driftwood's super busy with other things and he doesn't owe us anything. Also, I wouldn't expect anything miraculous from T8 - there's prolly not much juice left to squeeze from our beloved little GH2s:)

@lonely1: Definitely! Since the beginning of February T8 is being "refining" - nothing bad, but since this forum was created especially for this purpose and a lot of members are here from all around the world, all we should know already what kind of modification and "refining" is T8 for - the same as we knew for example about GH4 specifications before it was released. Am I right or wrong?

Sorry for my sincerity, but a doubt appears about if T8 is significantly worth, especially if its modifications are based on GH3/4.

That may be so, but when someone announce a release on a date, people depend on it. This is like 3 times postphoned already.

@cjdincer: Or a silence before the next few months of silence :)

@TATZU: Wait for another weekend.

Since T8 wasn't released again, at least an info should be released about it.

Actually, the complete information in advance about T8 specifications and what to expect from it would be more interesting than the patch itself. For now...

great news. more refined and tuned version of moon. :)

Awesome. Been waiting for Moon T8 for a while. Think it will be an awesome compliment to my GH4.

Moon t5 with minolta rokkor-x 50, iso 320.