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Help! Broken camera?
  • samstjohnsamstjohn

    Hi

    I was in love with the GH2 when i bought it in Dec 2011. Now, 6 months down the line, i'm pretty much heart broken.

    I bought it to hack. I have put three hacks on it so far, driftwoods AquAmotion. EOS Unified, and EOS Vanilla.

    I've had it playing up on me a while now. Shot some documentary stuff on it and started noticing these weird things happening when i looked at the converted files (MTS converted via FCP log and transfer function)

    1st, its grainy as hell. Even shooting outside at ISO 160 with a stop of about 5.6 with a 0.50 shutter is grainy.

    Im also getting these strange banding issues, colours (purple/blue) appear on the screen for no reason.

    Whats happening? I managed to shoot a music video in February on it with the AquAmotion hack no problem (apart from graininess on his face on one of the beginning shots) >

    I rung Panasonic this morning and they said that because i bought it off ebay it wouldn't be covered under warranty. So i can pay for a company down in London to do a repair on it.

    I tried putting the firmware 1.1 back on to it and unhacking the camera, but it says 'no picture to play' on the screen when i put a SD card in with the fw (card formatted in camera, put into computer, GH2__V11.bin put onto card, play button pressed on camera)

    I'm really gutted about this. I feel like my camera is kinda useless to me now, i cant trust it to not play up on me, some stuff i shoot is fine, but alot of it is trashed by all the problems with it.

    Also check this out, this was shot with two GH2. The Static was a unhacked camera, the handheld head and shoulders was with EOS Vanilla.

    I feel like i shouldnt have touched a hack in the first place.

    What do i do? Is this a hack problem? Is my camera broken? How can i unhack it succesfully? How do i get the camera to just function normally? i dont even care if its hacked or not, i just wanna be able to shoot with it.

    Please help!

    Sam St. John

  • 10 Replies sorted by
  • samstjohnsamstjohn

    do you think these problems occured because the camera was in ETC?

  • kongkong

    looks like you're in ETC mode.

  • samstjohnsamstjohn

    Thoroughly checked the camera at all ISO settings. No sign of any of the issues from the original post. All i did to stop the problems was select reset from the in camera menu. Since this was done last night i have not had any of these issues happening. Weird, but great.

  • samstjohnsamstjohn

    Hey, Thanks for all the responses. You guys are great. So i had a shoot today, documenting some community projects. I was worried it was all gonna go horribly, but shot anyways. I was looking around online for a factory reset (just the same as re-flashing it i guess) and found nothing but someone mentioned using the reset on camera. So i did, far as i can tell it just changed all the settings in camera, nothing firmeware related. Anyways, I used a class 6 card with EOS Vanilla. Same patch i've been getting all these problems with. But today, it just worked. Barely any noise, it was actually looking like it should. It was an absolute pleasure watching the files after they had been transcoded. How strange is that? I thought it was gonna melt, coz it was pretty dark in places and i was shooting at 640.

    Just so its known, im pretty bad at this whole hacking thing, i came from the PD150 and XL2 cameras, which we're ready to roll at the drop of a hat. The reason i couldnt get the stock firmware back on my camera is because i hadnt renamed it to GH2__12.bin or whatever. So the camera thought it was the same firmware it had.

    @allenswrench What is iDynamic? and why should it be off? Also, i really liked driftwoods aquamotion and found a marked improvement in that hack, but i had to buy the 95 mb/s cards and a 16gb only ran me about 20 minutes. Plus i got noise at 1600 on a video for a museum i really didn't want noise on!

    Anyways, thank you very much for your replys. You guys give me hope that its my incompetence causing this and not the camera!

    Best

    Sam St. John

  • allenswrenchallenswrench

    If you make sure that the iDynamic is turned off and you follow the ISO bug rule, you will have the lowest possible noise the GH2 can achieve. If it is still not clean enough for you, you should probably use @driftwood 's high end settings and neat video. GH2's sensor is quite noisy and it's native ISO is not known (at least not to me), but I guess it's something like ISO 640, as it looks optimal there. If you are looking for a noise free look, turn the NR to -2 and denoise later in post. Considering the videos you attached, ISO 640 would be pretty good with a fast lens. Please note that GH2 has a rolling shutter, so it might not be ideal for concerts with strobes and flashes, sorry. Most people never notice this (or the noise) so relax and make videos.

  • driftwooddriftwood

    Probably EOS's settings. Have you freshly opened ptools with a newly/freshly copied Panasonic v1.11 firmware don't load any A-J settings and save the unchecked patched bin to a newly named GH2__12.bin name and reflash your camera. That puts it back to stock. Or do as subco suggests.

  • Mr_MooreMr_Moore

    Ideally, you’ll want to load the original firmware into PTool and save it without any modifications. You can give it any name. I have mine saved as GH2__V99.bin and keep it in the folder with other ready-made .bin files. Also in that folder, I have a text file with descriptions of each firmware along with its file name.

    If I suspect a problem (or simply want to do a comparative test agains stock firmware), I can quickly find it, because GH2__V99.bin in the last file in the list.

  • dtrdtr

    Sometimes my cam also doesn't see the fw file as well. I fix it by formatting the card and then putting the fw on it again.

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