Here's a quick video I put together for the 38th Black April Commemoration of the Fall of Saigon.

I've just installed the Sanity 5.1 thank you for that. But I get the 'recording cancelled due to card' message when recording 720p at Sh or H. I'm using a Transcend Class 10 32GB. Cinema 24p 1080 works great. I've reformatted the card and still no luck. Any advice?

@GSMYTH555

720P has been bullet proof - up until now :) The only thing I can suggest is to try a different card.

@GSMYTH555

By any chance did you use firmware 1.0? That would explain no HBR. Sanity 5 is designed for firmware 1.1.

@Ralph_B

Thanks for your reply. I have just retried it now, to no avail. My process: Reset firmware back to Pana 1.0, then update firmware to 1.1. (Checked at this point to see HBR and it was there). Load Sanity 5.1 onto newly formatted SD card. Update to that. (Screen asks to update to 1.0). No HBR available again and still got 720p cancellation issues. I was able to record Cinema 24p onto a Sandisk Class 4 card though. So it doesn't make sense! Maybe I had an issue in ptool, but I spotted none as such, it all went smoothly. Should I load 4.1 on first? Or 5?

Thanks for any help. George

Christ I'm an idiot. Top man ill try it today!

If you import into FCP 7, it transcodes to pro-res on import i think and there is no way to tell. You need to import in a different way - clipwrap, quicktime player (QT X will do it in 10.7 or later, just not in a batch), panasonic AVCam quicktime component, or anything else that will open and re-wrap the .MTS files to quicktime movies. These are the same video data recorded by the camera, just now in a quicktime wrapper instead of an AVCHD wrapper - so you can look at the datarates, and analyze what's happening. This will also save you disk space in the long run, because when done with a project you have the option of tossing your ProRes transcodes and just keeping the much smaller h.264 source files.

P.S. But I don't suggest using ffmpeg or ffmbc based software to re-wrap clips if you think you'll ever want to use the footage in FCP X in the future - ffmpeg and ffmbc generate h.264 movies that FCP X will not play for whatever reason - and will need to be transcoded, defeating one of the awesome things about FCP X which is that you can get away with almost never transcoding.

My son and friends shot this recreation of the opening scene of Memento using my GH2 with Sanity 5.1 for a contest. Heavily graded in post in some places to recreate the look.

@jweeke

You could try shooting with a lower ISO and/or try a different card.

@golson

That has nothing to do with the hack. Use a higher shutter speed to freeze the action. Try 1/500 second or even 1/1000 sec.

more tests with Sanity 5.1 and the Lumix 25mm 1.4.

@einstein7

Glad you're enjoying Sanity. When I set out to create my own patch, I had no pre-conceived notion as to what would be the best GOP length. I experimented with all of them and discovered that GOP 18 hit a magical sweet spot. Of course there's more to Sanity than just GOP, but it is important.

As for higher bitrates, well I experimented with those, too. The ones I settled on were able to pass my extreme stability tests. Higher bitrates failed those tests. Now those tests were extreme, and in normal shooting you may be able to get away using higher bitrates most of the time. But be advised, you may hit an occasional write error and lose the clip. You'll have to remove the battery to reset the camera.

So I loaded sanity up for the very first time ever. I was recording to a 64gb extreme w/o problems, loaded in a 16gb class 6 transcend for shits and giggles, and.. well.. It still worked? I have yet to get any recording errors. Is this normal, or did I screw up the hack?