With the newly released GH2 1.11 hack, the small GF2 is now also hackable. This camera also does 1080/25p inside a 1080i wrapper, and features a similar image processing chip and encoder to the GH2. Could it be a bargain GH2 alternative? EOSHD takes a look.
Meanwhile Magic Lantern continues to improve. There’s current a brute force testing approach which according to Alex of Magic Lantern may “unlock many things that previously were thought to be impossible or very hard” like anamorphic preview and clean HDMI out.
GH2 1080/25p at 88Mbit AVC-Intra
Today I tested a new version of my patch settings for 88Mbit I-frame AVCHD on the GH2 with the newly hacked firmware version 1.11.
The good news is that the camera does seem to apply this patch to the new HBR 1080/30/25p mode of version 1.11.
This means there will be an update to the GH2 Patch Vault soon which European shooters may find useful!
Also Japanese / NTSC GH2 owners who live in PAL countries or indeed any GH2 owner who travels can now shoot in both 30p or 25p depending on their region. Sure enough the PAL / NTSC switch Vitaliy installed in the GH2’s menus alters the HBR mode on my Japanese body from NTSC 30p to 25p. It no longer just affects the 1080/60/50i manual movie mode.
A big thanks to Vitaliy for his efforts, once again.
Magic Lantern Unified improvements
I’ve been using the Magic Lantern Unified hack on the Canon 5D Mark II recently and it is now working very stably.
The team behind Magic Lantern say that most of the features (like FPS override and focus peaking) were enabled by changing DIGIC registers… These are parameters in the firmware which change the behaviour of the camera.
Some brave testers are now required to go through all the registers in the firmware and alter them one by one to see what affect they have. This brute force approach is needed because obviously no hacker has access to the code documentation at Canon HQ or the programmers responsible for it, so are working on exploring it mostly blindly by trial and error.
Magic Lantern say that the following features may become possible by changing registers:
- Clean HDMI out (or at least shrink the black bars a bit)
- Moving the recorded box around in crop mode (digital panning)
- Custom curves applied to image
- Anamorphic preview (LiveView image can be rescaled without altering recorded image)
- Peripheral correction for manual lenses
- Flipped or mirrored display
- Maybe also custom video modes (FullHD crop mode)
- etc.
If you are technically astute and don’t mind risking your camera, you can join the effort and discover the new features. Click here to find out how.
Panasonic GF2 now hackable
Video wise, the GF2 is basically a GF1 with a more up to date image processor. Although the sensor is not up to the GH2 standard, either in terms of scaling the image in video mode or high ISO performance, the camera body is dirt cheap.
I just picked one up for ÂŁ150 on eBay UK which when you think about what it could be capable of with the hack is amazing. If you need a few b-cameras for your main DSLR on a very strict budget, especially if you already have a load of lenses for your GH2 – the GF2 could be a great option. As a crash-cam too it is very small and cost effective. And of course for existing GF2 owners – your number has come up for better video quality.
The NTSC model does 1080/30p and no 24p. This isn’t great, but happily for PAL users our pain suffered with having to use 24p on the GH2 instead of 25p for so long has resulted in some karma, because the PAL GF2 does 1080/25p!
It only recorded at a lowly bitrate of 17Mbit – and now with the hack – who knows?
Mine is on the way and it will be interesting to see how it performs. No it is not going to be as good as the GH2 but how close can it get for 1/5th of the price?
