I had a nightmare trying to use my GH2 today, on a visit to an arboretum near where I live (a big park with lots of diverse trees, all turning red right now).

HEaring of all of the 24p troubles for us in PAL-land, I figured I'd shoot in 720p50, so I loaded the CBrandin 44Mb patch, as I wanted a long record time.

So, unlike the GH1, I discovered you can't shoot 720p in the creative movie mode, so I did so in M mode.

In M mode, I set the video out to PAL, and mode to SH, etc. so it should be 720p50. Set the ISO to 160, as it was a nice day, hit record, and the ISO instantly turns to AUTO, and the exposure meters vanish!!??!! What the f*£k? Why? What am I doing wrong?

I am sorely missing the standard 25p and 50p of the GH1 right now.

@Lanzar: you should be able to switch to PAL output then.. Not sure why your camera started up in NTSC, unless you bought it abroad. The issue with external monitoring and interlacing has nothing to do with the hack as far as I know. I'm interested in a way around this myself.
If you cannot switch to PAL output, I suggest you redo the patch just to make sure everything is A-OK.

@LucasAdamson ignore "AutoISO" whilst recording. It's a display bug. The camera does not suddenly switch to Auto when you shoot unless you make it shoot in Auto. Do you shoot with the dial in Manual? I suggest setting the dial in Video instead for best reliability that you actually get the settings you want / that everything is what it says.
Unless you have artificial lighting in the scene, I would not worry too much about shooting 24p. Even if you have some artificial lighting it might be ok. It depends on circumstance, really - but you will no doubt notice flickering if there are problems with a certain scene. If there are artificial lights nearby - but no flicker - Just check the light sources nearby (by pointing towards them) - because stray light can cause flickering that is harder to detect. A good general tip is to push record before doing the actual shot to see what you get.

Did you format the card in your camera with AQuarius installed? I had to do that even with a low level formatted card to be able to use AQuarius without issues.

@RRRR I hadn't anticipated all these bugs, as the GH1 hack is so stable and bug-free.

Thanks for your advice. When you say that I should shoot in the VIDEO rather than MANUAL, what do you mean? The creative Video mode (camera symbol) has only 24p options - no 720p at all! For 720p, it seems you have to go into any of the other modes, of which I presumed M was the most user-controlled. Not only was the AUTO-ISO displayed during recording, but it also gave me no exposure indicators.

I do hope there is a 1080p25 option this side of Christmas, as I am not able to use this for anything serious and that's what I had intended to do.

@Lanzar by the way.. read trough this thread for more info on the hdmi output: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/356/gh2-hack-hdmi-output-testing/p1

There is a way to resample the signal from the hdmi output with acceptable results, but it seems too complicated for my own usage of the camera.. Maybe you will find it more useful.

IN-CAMERA aspect ratio w/ AVCHD:

I'm working with a Sankor 16c which has a 2x aspect ratio.
My question is if it's possible to work with an IN-CAMERA aspect ratio of 4:3 using the AVCHD codec.

Essentially what I'm looking for is to shoot 1960x1475 in AVCHD. Is this hackable?

Hi again all. I installed Driftwoods "beautiful buffers" patch just to get a good all around patch for comparison with the stock settings. All around I was very pleased. There were a couple card write speed errors though and I have a Sandisk ProExtreme 45mbs card, so I'm guessing the card is not the issue. Does it matter which version of Ptools you use relative to the hack? I have Ptools V 3.63. On a side not when I would get the speed error, I could not turn off the camera without removing the battery. Is this normal for card speed write errors?

@RRR, thanks for the response. I have been formatting the card in the camera between every set of pics I upload to the PC. When you say low level format on the PC, do you mean what the computer refers to as "quick format"? What is the advantage here? Also is there a reason so many recommend the Sandisk Extreme Pro 30 mbps card? Is it just the price to performance aspect, or is it actually better than say my 45 mbps card?

@mee: it's not a quick format.. It might be named LLF or something in win7, I've just done it on a friends computer so I can't really give you closer information about it - just that it makes the card perform a lot better. (it doesn't replace the need to do cam format in-between patches). It'll take 15 mins or so to do a low level format on a 16gb card. Remember it is an option for FAT32 file system.

I'm talking about the card which you plan to use for shooting with the updated firmware. For making driftwoods high end patches work flawlessly.

what's the latest hack for GF1 as of today?

I'm getting a strange issue, which hasn't been solved by following what's been said. I have patched my GH2 several times, first time trying Driftwood Aquarius, then back to vanilla, then Driftwood reAQuainted, and now for a movie project I need to bring it back to vanilla (since we'll be doing longer shoots than 176M allows me to do)

But it won't update! I did as usual, format card, turn off, turn back on, put firmware in, turn off, unplug from computer, turn back on, press preview play, and nada.

I figured, well, maybe version increments will fix it. I had never touched the version increment before, but I thought if it's not detecting the new firmware, let's try upping it. So I upped by 2. Nothing. 5? Nothing. 10? Still nothing. 20? Nothing. Even 100, nothing happened. All it does is it pops up this thing saying "These pictures are displayed at 16:9!" and then "No Pictures to Display."

I'm not sure what to do now... Help?

ok, finally got to the right section... sorry :(

Hello all :)
I've been browsing the internet for a long time looking for this info but couldn't find anything relevant about it.
I understand that HDMI output while recording has been hacked, but what about component liveview output, has it been hacked?

Thanks for your help,
Bob

ok, thanks Vitaliy :)
camera aimed to screen, not really an option because of possible flare and extra weight/complexitiy/failure cause.
HDMI to component converter... all those I tried wouldn't work or weight a lot :(
Would you have a link to something light I could use please?

Bob