Well, I was trying to help you. Just hold onto the stems. You'll understand when you're older.

Thanks but I don't drink. Tell you what, instead of the drink, just tell me you saved the stems of the footage of your kids, because in 5 years you're going to want to kill yourself if the only home movies you have of them at that age are all cookie cutter Vimeo Hipster 101 with indie music bed, drastic grading and slo-mo. This look is already dated, but down the road you're going to want the raw footage so you can just enjoy seeing your kids at that age, free of all that copycat artsy crap. Trust me on this.

Nice one. Maybe T9 will feature automatic top/bottom cropping and slow motion, so all your home movies will look like Drugstore Cowboy. Boo yah!

@Shaveblog You must have ESP! You are able to read my mind. It seems that many GH2 hackers are not aware that the patches only modify maximum bitrate & encoding matrices (plus audio). There are no magic 'low light' 'log-like' 'filmic' 'cinematic' (or other emotional phrase) patches. Also if you think the GH2 looks better than the GH4, you are in for a rude shock. I own both. GH4 is a vast improvement in every way. On most of my two camera shoots I must do a lot of work to make the patched GH2 look as good as the GH4, and that includes lots of grading and Neat Video NR. The main limitations on all the Panasonic cameras is 8 bit 4:2:0 encoding and AVC/H264 compression. Heavy grading reveals the macro-blocking. But all modern cameras that use heavy compression have this issue.

Thank you @Shaveblog! I have no idea who you are or what your credentials are, but my amateur observations to date give me enough information to know that you make good sense and that I should take note of what you are saying. I appreciate the time you took to type that! I'm going to cyber-stalk you on here now and see what else I can learn. :)

Ah, the old "you can only haz a opinion if you post a spec rap video" gambit. Well played, gazweb, clearly your 7 whole months as a member here and your single post to date entitle you to that most devastating of internet smackdowns, the adding of the word butt to someone's ID.

Seriously guys, I've been checking in here to see if Nick is still whittling away at his patches for the GH2, which has been my main cam since its release. I think Nick's done amazing work, really impressive stuff, but the silly aftermath chatter can get tiresome. A few things I need to get off my chest so hopefully a few newbies here can avoid a lengthy and expensive snipe hunt:

All this talk about noise and low light shooting and fast lenses is silly. The only people who think the fix for this is a super fast f.95 lens shot wide open with the GH2 at ISO320 or below are hobbyists proving the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Because if you guys really were pros, you'd know that:

Nobody who's anybody shoots f.95 glass wide open for video except forum hobbyists and "pro video guru" swag beggars with cam-porn sites whose sole reason for being is to ensure that said guru never has to pay for another camera, lens, or accessory again as long as B&H's media outreach guys keep culling blems and B-stock for blogger chow.

Real pros stop lenses down to f2.8 or even better f4 to oh, I don't know, make the image look sharp and ensure enough depth of field so talent's entire head is in focus. And in the rare event that a real pro finds himself having to shoot a scene that isn't properly lit, he doesn't sweat ISO320 and fiddly Chinese "blogger's favorite" glass (anyone want to buy a 12mm f1.6 that fell apart in my hands after a year?). Instead, he turns to that professional tool that you guys seem mostly loathe to even acknowledge:

NOISE REDUCTION.

Seriously, I read the threads here going on and on about what's the best ISO for noise, what's the fastest lens you can shoot wide open if you're shooting a dark alley scene at night for your "festival feature", and it literally saps my will to live. If you ever meet a real pro and they invite you to come see where they work, you'll discover that NR is used on pretty much everything you ever see that was ever shot on video. If it's on broadcast TV, if it's a digitally shot film, if it's shot on actual film FFS and transferred to digital for grading/editing, it's been processed with noise reduction. You guys are kidding yourselves if you think shooting f.95 hobby lenses wide open and never going over ISO320 is your ticket to Cannes. A properly NR'd GH2, even a stock GH2, shoots better looking low-light footage at ISO1250 with a lens stopped down a few clicks than even the best hacked GH2 with wide open fast glass at ISO320. This isn't voodoo. Take 15 mins and test it for yourself.

If you edit with Adobe you've already got usable NR baked into your toolkit. Red Giant's $99 Denoise II is better still and probably less than what you paid for the follow focus/gears/Flycam Nano you never use. Or you can cut to the chase and get a real pro tool like NeatVideo Pro, the best $200 you will ever spend. Add NeatVideo to your toolkit and you're done discussing ISO320, f.95, all that nonsense. Spend an afternoon playing with it and you'll find it's not brain surgery to get rid of practically all visible noise with zero perceptual loss of detail. Train yourself to train the software and you'll be angry at yourself for ever having fed these stupid threads.

Okay, back to T9. I'm sure it's going to be fine, Nick's a very smart guy, I've donated and support his and Vitaliy's work because it's helped me achieve better results with mine. But having followed this scene since the very first hacks and patches, I'm not expecting any real breakthrough. Maybe it looks slightly different than my workhorses IV2 and T8, and maybe it doesn't. Doesn't matter, you guys will explode anyway because that's what you do, you hail any new gadget or add-on as the answer to your prayers and then when the dust settles you realize your video still looks like amateur video, no better than if you'd just whipped out your iPhone and shot auto-focus 30p with the stock camera app.

Seriously, gazbutt (see what I did there?), "brilliant work coming from everybody else"? Sorry, no, not even close. Nothing personal guys but practically all of the videos I see here look about as good or not quite as good as stock footage from an iPhone, and no, "that "ohhh, YouTube/Vimeo's crappy compression, it totally robs my precious work of its cinematic quality" doesn't hold water with anyone who knows how this stuff works. Go rip a BluRay or hell even a DVD of your favorite movie and run it through five rounds of YouTube's compression and it's still going to knock you on your socks.

You guys really want to get better? Be more critical of yourselves and others. Want to become better, or possibly even a pro? Stop feeding this echo chamber of amateurs telling other amateurs their videos look amazing. They don't. Stop polishing each other's knobs every time someone posts a spec rap video that looks like surveillance footage. Stop judging video patches from a single frame grab. Stop chasing nonsense like shooting pitch black alleys at night with no lights and expecting ISO320 and a Voitlander to save you from your own ineptitude. Stop feeding each other's ignorance and chasing away any real pros who might have some experience and insight to share (Hi Burnet! Burnet?..) Stop being so defensively reactive anytime someone challenges the dogma that a camera which was already, in bone-stock form, more capable of shooting professional grade footage than you'll ever be, just needs slightly less quantization noise and slightly more "filmic grain" to make you a real filmmaker.

Look at this kid:

Jesus, that haircut. His Urban Outfitters Mao hat is even worse. He's almost a perfect parody of a clueless art hipster. Just watching him running around with a steadicam and grabbing it by the counterweight makes me lose the will to live.

Except, he gets it. He's shooting this short with an iPhone 6. Yeah, he's shooting with a 3rd party app, but I've got an iPhone 6 too and you know what, MoviePro/Filmic Pro footage doesn't really look any better than the stock camera app. No, this kid gets it because he knows he's got a camera that's already better than what lots of famous movies were shot with, so he's MOVED ON. He's not worrying about the camera and ISO320 and f.95 and grain and "cinematic motion cadence" and "1/40 looks better than 1/50" "no it doesn't!" "yes it does!" "you're gay!" "you're Hitler!" "You're gay Hitler!". Instead, he's focused on all the important aspects of shooting good looking video that ACTUALLY MATTER. He's got good lighting. He knows how to frame his subject. He's stabilizing the camera with the $11 eBay Gorillapod knockoff. Okay, so he has no clue how to rock a Flycam but you know what, I stupidly ordered that thing myself way back when and frankly if he's gripping it by the counterweight he's probably getting about as good a result from that POS as holding it the right way.

The kid gets it. He should serve as an example to all the guys here who keep holding out hope that Nick will come to their rescue and deliver a patch that, once and for all, will turn the GH2 into a Panavision. That's Never Going To Happen. Nick's patches make a good camera better, and boy would I rather shoot with my Nick'd GH2 than my iPhone 6 on anything worth shooting, but the fact is, if you find yourself still whinging about ISO320 and f.95 and shadow detail and picture profiles, you're doomed to always stay exactly as bad at this as you are currently.

So please, I beg you. Enough with the nonsense. T9 will arrive at Nick's leisure, and we'll all try it, and some of you will go ape, and some of you will squint to see the difference, and some of you will claim that T7's sharper, or T5's more "organic", or IV2's more "80s romcom", or FlowBee's more "cinematic", but none of you will be one iota better at shooting video because of a patch. Look at that kid and learn from his example. Because haircut aside, he's miles ahead of anyone here, and that includes me. Something to think about. Or not, as the case may be (grammatically challenged response validating this in three, two, one...)

Golly you guys, I am so pumped about T9! Producer, I totally know what you mean about judging a video encoding algorithm by a still frame - not only is that grain (and guys I totes get that no video camera actually has "grain" and that by continually referring to video noise as "grain" you're basically telegraphing your grasp of videography, but so what, grain is KEWL, like in those classic olden time movies like Joe Dirt and White Chicks) WAY more excellent, but from that still frame I can even tell that motion is smoother and more cinematic too.

Also, you are totes on the money about identifying the camera profile from a still frame of a scene you have no idea what it looks like in real life. No question, it HAZ to be Vibrant, good eye my friend. Who needs to see what the real life scenery looked like in order to judge the color differences in the still frame? You just throw a mental dart and bududududududu, it's Vibrant.

There's so much you can tell about T9 from just a still frame, like for instance how much better skin tone is. I know, there's no people in the still frame, but I just know it's better than any patch that came before, because all the other stuff is so much better, and since you can tell all that other stuff from the still frame, I think we can assume skin tone is now a solved issue, FIXED. DONE. MOVE ON.

So anyway Nick if you're reading this, I wanna make some suggestions like some of the other brothers in cinemagraphy here. Can you make T9 a lot better except use a lot less bitrate than T8? I gots all these super cheap SD cards, some of them came for free with some point and shoot cameras I got back in the 90s, so they're not only slow but like really low amount-wise, like 512MB and whatnot. So could you make T9 work with these cards? Looking at that still frame again and having not a clue about how any of this stuff works, I'd say make T9 top out at 20MB for the high detail HDR scenes I'll be shooting on my next feature and/or spec rap video.

Um, wait a minute. I just looked at that still frame again and um, I think I need to retract some of my prior statements. No offense Producer but upon further analsis, I think that was actually shot in a modified new profile that hasn't been available on the GH2 yet!!!!! It seems to combine the best of all the different GH2 picture profiles - the low noise of Standard, the gentle highlight roll off of Nostalgic, the flat as a pancake LUT of Smoov, the monochrome simplicity of B&W, and the set it and forget it awesomeness of iA. This new picture is what we've been crying for, and T9 is already a legend because of it. I mean, just look at that still frame! Now imagine 22.98 more of them, and you can easily see how amazing a second of footage looks with this new patch.

and to think I wuz about to huck my GH2 in the river and get a GH5 so I can shoot my kids' school plays in 8K. Fuggeddaboutit.

@LiftCM Yes I wholeheartedly agree about the Voigtlander and GH2! I would say the best combination would be the Moon Hack or Spizz, some effective lighting, and the Voigtlander ( I now have the 17.5 to go along with my 25mm). As of right now, I'm trying to sell my Blackmagic instead of my GH2. Although on paper the Blackmagic would look to be the better camera, I've done my best work whether it be weddings, music videos, or films on the GH2, and the form factor of the Blackmagic doesn't help matters much either. When people get poor results with the GH2, its hard for me to feel bad because I know the potential it has if only the person would just invest a little in lighting and learn how to handle the footage. @Tjabo I've been shooting all my projects in Manual Mode at 720p, and if you look at my music video then you'll see that you can't really tell the difference between the high resolution Blackmagic footage and the 720p GH2 footage. @producer I'm sure the Moon T9 Hack will be a whole lot sharper though, which could be a good or bad thing for some people. When we used the Moon T8 Hack on my last film though we were blown away by the resolution. All the night scenes were nice and sharp and the daytime scenes were unreal! At the end of the day though, the GH2 is merely a tool and no matter how good the Hacks are it still wont make a film good (It'll make it look good though).

I don't think anything significant can be done on the GH2 again except as @producers said, work on profiles with new parameters. Paired with some good lenses though, I am still using and enjoying Intravenus II and Moon T8. But I am gonna see what Moon T9 is gonna offer.

On another note it will be really cool if there was that kinda Magic Lantern hack on the GH line. I know, I know it's something quite different lol. Wishful thinking...

@driftwood good news ya. please do release a bitrate lowered version of ALL-I frame Moon t9. i am looking for bitrate around 100mbps. 140mbps is too much to handle. other releases are not doing all i frames. please do release a alter version.

@Gardner: "I don't think Driftwood can improve the GH2 much more."

Since Moon T9 is coming, obviously there is some little more improvement possible. But I agree with you that it will be not something significant. And that's because all the hard work was spent unilaterally for the GH2 codec and bitrate at all. The significant improvements should've come if a work was spent for GH2 profiles and their parameters! I appealed about such an idea two years ago, but was a voice in a desert.

I don't think Driftwood can improve the GH2 much more. I haven't switched a hack for sometime now, that's how satisfied and confident I am with my GH2.