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theabortionator
April, 2025

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GH2 Hacking!

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B.Taillefer
Posts: 420 - Karma: 321
So I think more and more people here on NS are getting into the GH2, and thought it be be good to have a place to discuss hacking! What hack you're using, results, and just general discussion!

I am using the Cake v2.3 Hack right now and am somewhat satisfied, I am not sure if it it the actual hack or if I applied it incorrectly, but I am just not getting the best quality, at least to my eye. I would love if someone walked through settings, like bitrate, GOP, etc, to maximize quality, because I want my footage looking like this, too damn beautiful.
13 years ago
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VT_scratch
Posts: 8845 - Karma: 6,679
right on brotha. I tried hacking my gh1 but was unsuccesful, then didn't really give it a go again.

lots of helpful information here:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/forumdisplay.php?175-Panasonic-GH-Cameras&s=5a9e99c1a3b35375090e1bf19fff084f
13 years ago
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plorr
Posts: 3131 - Karma: 520
I've tried out quite a few of the different hacks. I used to use Cake, it was good quality and very reliable. Now I use Sanity 5. Pretty similar to Cake. High quality, reasonable file sizes, totally reliable.

I've tried a few of the really high bitrate I-frame ones, and they just havent been reliable (Flowmotion, Unified, etc). I use Sandisk 45mbps cards, but for some reason, I almost always got card speed errors with Panasonic glass (my kit lens or 7-14mm), but only sometimes with vintage glass or the 25mm f0.95 I have rented. I don't know if this has to do with the sharpness of the glass, or the fact that the electronic connection takes up some of the processor speed in the camera. For me, the reliability issues arent worth the increase in quality, especially since pretty much everything I do just ends up on the internet anyway.

Pretty much just have to read around on personal-view, try out a few different patches and figure out which one works for you. Some of the ones that people rave about on there have been totally unreliable for me, but some that people have had problems with have worked fine for me.
13 years ago
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123+ski
Posts: 2832 - Karma: 581
I love the intra ones, I forget what I have now, but I want to say its a new version of quantum 9b or mysterion. I have been really busy at school, but when I get a chance I want to try the apocalypse now ones. As far as cards, I use sandisk extreme 30MB/s cards and have never had a problem with the speed of the card. The only time I did was shooting high detail with a high shutter speed, but it was a long time ago with one hack, only on the 720p 60 mode, and I believe it was with a different card
13 years ago
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B.Taillefer
Posts: 420 - Karma: 321
Re-installed the Cake hack properly this time and am loving it, lowered GOP makes low light filming pretty unbelievable!

And I have tried the higher bitrate hacks, I have an Extreme Pro 95MB/s card so I wasn't too worried about the card not being able to handle the hack, but I just hated how quickly the card would fill up, like 30 minutes of filming time on a 32 gb card is just useless, so the increase in quality was not worth it for me.
13 years ago
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123+ski
Posts: 2832 - Karma: 581
I usually get 28 haha. But ya it can get annoying, still figuring out what I'm doing about that
13 years ago
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B.Taillefer
Posts: 420 - Karma: 321
Yeah the only real option is just to get more SD cards, which just sucks haha, but otherwise I see no real way around it.
13 years ago
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Linked
Posts: 325 - Karma: 216
what did you do wrong the when you installed it the first time?

13 years ago
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B.Taillefer
Posts: 420 - Karma: 321
Went about Ptool checking boxes manually and using the suggested values for the bitrate hacks instead of just actually loading the hack directly into Ptool which then implements its own settings for nitrate and GOP, which were much different than the ones I had initially set! Much higher quality now!
13 years ago
0 0
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123+ski
Posts: 2832 - Karma: 581
ya, I get that. I think that I may need to rethink my file organization and stuff, and will probably need to be buying a few more external drives before too long. But the quality it puts out is unreal
13 years ago
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