GH2 HACK PROBLEMS ... NOISE ... BURNT PIXEL ... NOISE!

[SamStJohn]

Before i begin, i just want to say i dont mean to sound so negative... i'm just a bit gutted.

I bought a GH2 about 5 months ago. I'd been geeking it up online about the hack for a long while. The hack and the high regard the camera was given were the reasons i bought it.

When i had the camera, I put on the driftwood Aquamotion hack, bought some fast cards. no real problem apart from getting some slight noise on some shots and having 22 minutes per 16gb card. When i shot a conference and found all my footage to be heavily noisy at ISO 1600 i decided it was time to re-hack.

Was wanting to increase the amount of time per card so changed hack to EOS 88 mb/s. Strangly, it didnt increase the time on a 16gb card, it still only gave me 22minutes. Have had nothing but bad results, there is a sort of green/red banding issue in the sun light where the shutter speed is correctly set. Theres noise... EVERYWHERE. i cant go up through the ISOs. shooting everything at 160/200 to try and not get noisy footage. ISO 1600 is dead to the camera. I shot an interview side by side with an un-hacked camera and the noise and loss of quality on the hack is unreal. I cant honestly believe that i am the only one getting these sorts of results. I shot the two cameras side by side on a very un-technical colour chart. I found the hacked GH2 had a massive increase in sensitivity to light. It could see the chart a lot sooner than the un-hacked and it blew out a lot before. theres noise even on ISO 160.

This is really annoying me now, and i need to get it fixed asap. first im going to un-hack it. then i might send it back to panasonic and see if its defective, I've already found a burnt pixel on it after my last shoot. its really got me wondering about the hacks and whether its the camera or the software, or if the cameras getting burnt out by the software or whatever.  Like i said at the start, i dont mean to sound negative, im just sharing my experiences, and reaching out for some opinions on this situation.

What would you do?

Best

Sam St. John
Paragon Pictures

[Axel]

[quote author=SamStJohn link=topic=507.msg3325#msg3325 date=1333272258]What would you do?[/quote]

Uncheck all bitrate-related positions in the pTool. Unhack, for that matter.

The benefits of higher bitrates are questionable. Part of the hype obviously is not based on facts. And with FW 1.1 the reports about problems amass. Even expensive cards stuck or freeze.

If you have a shoot in a dark place and you know it in advance, make a quick FW-"update" to FW 1.0 with Vanilla. The shadows look better with this.

[SamStJohn]

Hi Axel

Thanks for replying.
I am going to unhack it back to standard FW1.1 straight off.

Would you recommend shooting with FW1.0 with vanilla as standard? or just straight up no hack?

Best

Sam

[Axel]

I didn't have your bad experiences. You asked "what would you do?"

Like many (if not all) members of this forum I too believe that higher bitrates can bee good. I just don't know if the difference over 44 mbit really matters. And I honestly don't see it in highkey shots.

I made making ofs of music videos in a nightclub on two subsequent weekends, first with, second without hack. It would have been hard to tell if I compared just two seperate clips, but with [i]over an hour each[/i], I found the higher bitrate really as from "another camera", and a better one.

On the other hand, if I suddenly realized, after many shots, that it was all with unhacked firmware, I'd say "oh" and not even "fuck", because the original codec [u]is[/u] very, very good.