It has been a while since I was here now, been focusing all on post now and very little shooting so I'm not up to date with the hacks. I have a question and would appreciate any advices you can give:

I'm going for a shooting gig tonight and will shoot in 25fps with my GH2. What's the best hack for now that is pretty reliable, but most of all is giving the best amount of details and overall image in general? Any tips on what I should try?

I know all hacks is good at different things but is there some hack that is overall good and that you would suggest me to use?

@2many I use Intravenus V2 and like that it isn't too sharp. But if you want sharper, maybe you should try the Moon Trial 5 hack setting by Driftwood. It can be found on this forum in the thread on Cluster. Some peoole also like the hack setting called Flowmotion, also available on this forum. Both of these should give you images that look sharper than Intravenus V2.

In terms of lenses I think the consensus is that the Panasonic Lumix lenses tend to be the sharpest. There should be a thread on that somewhere on this forum.

Best of luck finding your prefect image style.

@matt35.. you might wanna check out Sanity patches... they are very nice for your type of requirement at low bitrates..

Short doc shot entirely with Intravenus II. Love this hack.

@Aashay Take a look at @BKMCWD 's thread. I believe he makes a lot of settings/patches that are similar to @Driftwood 's in function but are often lower bitrate. I think his focus is also on stability as primary goal, so they should be reliable.

@matt_gh2 cheers matt.. I have tried Valkyrie Lite and now planning on tryin TZ3. Is it using the same matrix as IV2? I haven't tried IV2 because of its huge file size but I love everything I see from that patch. Have you tried IV2? Is there any particular setting you would recommend from bkmcwd's pot of patches?

@Aashay I've used IV2 for awhile now. Bitrate at 100-120 if I remember my last streamparser check.

I don't know which of @BKMCWD 's settings/patches are similar to IV2. Maybe try to PM him - seems like a friendly guy and I'm sure he'd let you know best advice on how to get the IV2 look with lower bitrate.

You may want to test IV2 to see what kind of file sizes you get. Maybe its manageable....hard drives seem to be getting cheaper by the minute!

@brucker I've been using IV2 and playback has been fine so far. Curious to what problems you have with playback - will IV2 just straight up not play at all, or is audio choppy, or something else? I had some problems with choppy audio on Boom and believe that's the camera havibg trouble handling the bigger Boom bitrate when trying to playback (it's all fine once I bring into video editor...its just the in camera playback).

Thought I'd get your 2 cents since I plan to use IV2 for project where I'll need playback in cam while in field. Thanks

IV2 i used ages ago so cant quite recall,... might have had to switch the camera off and on again. Boom would sometimes work and sometimes require you to switch the camera off then on again. it would say that the image could not be read or something like that. it would normally play right after powering up, but sometime sthe audio was choppy,... but bear in mind i was using it for short clips of around a minute or so.

@driftwood yes i knew about the playback decoder not being able to handle the massive bitrates going in so it doesnt bother me,... the quality for the footage is worth the minor inconvenience,... if i could afford a dozen 64gb sandisks i'd shoot boom all day every damn day :D

@driftwood... Is there any possibility of IV2 setting existing in long gop like you did with Boom Drewnet setting?

@bkmcwd.. Would it be possible to pm me the link. It is kinda hard to find exact setting on your page. (One critique If I may. When you get time, try n get it bit more organized.) Thank you. :)

@matt_gh2, that piece was shot Smooth (all -2) with 25mm Voigtlander and 50mm Nikon Nikkor AF-D.