What are the high bitrates, exactly? It may be useful to show at least some number

@Fool4UAnyway Check my 3rd post quite on its beginning. I can not give you other numbers in this moment, the bitrate is anyway variable and it will strongly depend on your subjects, lighting and lenses. I will update soon first three posts with more facts.

720p60 mode wasn't priority target of this patch, although the GH1 produces files with highest bitrates in this mode. It needs much more testing. I've uploaded screenshot with strange looking P-frames just to demonstrate the problems from the early stages of the patch in "S" mode. 720p60 seems to be meanwhile under control, but it does need much more testings- this is beta version. I will try to improve this mode if it won't be on costs of 1080p24.

Here are freshly done StreamParser analysis of 30s real-life testshots in 720p60 mode:

@ tetakpatak

Thanks for releasing this patch!

I was hoping for a definitive low GOP patch to use with my GH1. I really appreciate you keeping the patch development for the GH1 moving forward. And of course thanks to Vitaliy, LPowell, Rigs, GH13Timelapser and others for there contributions as well.

All the best,

Mark

I have to start with the little GH1 history here:
Hacking GH1's firmware and creation of the Ptool was Vitaliy's really big score and made his work internationally well-known. At that time, Vitaliy was still known under name "Tester 13". This hack has changed the world: many people saw from this moment on that not all hacks definitely have to mean something negative. Among many hackers who try to achieve good things with their work, there are unfortunatelly also some, who cause damages in the PC systems and data lost. Vitaliy's hack was not made to cause any harm or devostation- just in contrary, it has opened the possibility for countless small-budget-film producers to fullfill their dreams without ruining their financial future with bank loans for expensive cameras. Without injury of copyrights or any other laws, Vitaliy's hack of the GH1's firmware was the most elegant way in the newer history and example how firmware manipulation of a camera can produce creativity. In its way, it was poverty eradication deed in the world of videography.

Hacked GH1 can't hold as high bitrates as the hacked GH2 can, due to limited speed of its SD card writer. Also, the GH1 isn't featuring highly effective B-frames like the GH2 does. Our p-v mate @LPowell has made the biggest and most honourable work in development of the patches for the GH1, especially after Vitaliy's release of Ptool versions of newer generations. So although it is great pity that very productive people like @driftwood or @bkmcwd didn't contribute so much to explore the GH1 until its utterly limits, the fact remains that there is no so much space for developing the patches for the GH1 due to the hardware limitations of this camera. LPowell's excellent patches cover needs for many situations and most of people who use the GH1 can be well-served with one of his patches.

Regarding some specific film situations in the recording situations I am constantly confronted with- and due to the fact that none of the existing patches covers my own needs completely well, I was forced to work on my own patch which would do it all. It is one single patch I needed and it has been developed in small steps over many months so my GH1s perfectly serves me now. Specificly spoken, I often record concert performances of classical music. All seen happens only once, at least 5-6 cameras must run all the time and reliably record whole the performance. I can maintain in the silence only one single camera (if at all) and have no access to any of other cameras during whole the performance (save for during the break which is middle in the concert) and those cameras are positioned all over balconies, sometimes quite difficult to reach anyway. So the cameras just must reliably do their work in absolute silence, with one button push on the beginning to start- and second push to stop the recording after several hours. The other function I need is the timelapse, mostly in the nature, and it is less tricky situation- only very frequently used in my case.

As this patch was specially designed to give maximal performance and reliability in FHD 24p and in timelapse recordings (which are set to MJPEG), this patch has been optimized to give maximum there. In terms of the GH1 it means that the costs will likely be carried in all other settings. Due to its creation idea and unequally distributed priorities, it is not an universal patch although it should actually work in all modes. Therefore there is also huge gap between bitrates and GOP number of its NTSC mode (where the priority is set) and PAL modes, which is the weak part of this patch.

The "Varigop" patch is now in beta-stage. After the recording modes it was designed for worked really good, I've started fixing many smaller bugs in all other modes until this point, where they also seem to work just fine. But mind you, this patch will need more tests and it is likely that smaller bugs in other modes outside 24p and timelapse could occur. Besides my real life job, I have really little time left for additional testings (I am happy every time when I can go shooting at all), so it would make me very happy and it would help in the development of this patch to get any feedbacks about its functionality. That's why please feel welcome to try this patch and let me know your impressions.
Known strange behaviour: after flashing the patch for the first time, on some cameras "S" mode will seem to not work well (the value can only increase). Change the mode and try after that "S" mode again, on some GH1's where I tried it, this strange behaviour appeared only once and returned never again. So it didn't turn to be an issue sofar. Stabilizing of the "S" mode was BTW the greatest difficulty in development of this patch and the reason why I didn't release it long ago. In all first versions of the "Varigop", "S" mode was fully broken.

Special thanks to @cbrandin and @LPowell for some valuable advices which helped me recently to bring the "Varigop" to beta-stage and to @GH13Timelapser, Jordan Noblet who was the developer of this timelapse settings as well as his rendering software. My biggest thanks goes to @Vitaliy_Kiselev who will make me possible to make superpatch out of this if shutter speed in AVCHD could be set to minimum of 1/25s (instead of 1/30s right now) which would bring incredible benefits for all of us who live in PAL countries and where 1/30s can be problematic for causing the flickering under fluorescent lightings. I hope that the next version of Ptool will contain this possibility.