Video: Tsawout Spit – Gh2 Test (driftwood 176mb gop1 hack) from mark wyatt on Vimeo.

There seems to be no day without any surprises with the Panasonic GH2. The latest hot-shit is a hack to get 176Mbps AVCHD Intra up and running on the camera. Right now there's no possibility to record in 25p but there are attempts by vitaly and others, so let's see what the future holds.

What is AVCHD Intra?
"AVCHD Intra is usually recorded to extremely expensive P2 cards on high end cameras and here it is on a consumer camera with an SD card. [...] This is a codec that uses i-frames only unlike consumer AVCHD. Every frame from the sensor is stored. Standard AVCHD is a Long-GOP compression format and works by estimating and guessing at frames in-between ‘real’ images but Intra doesn’t. [...] AVCHD Intra is very good for heavy colour grading, fast action, hand held footage and green screen VFX work. You certainly get a better result from AVCHD Intra on the GH2 than by outputting from any DSLR’s HDMI feed to a external recorder as well." (via eosHD)

How does it compare?
eosHD has a comparison on AVCHD intra 100Mbps vs 24Mbit AVCHD.

And if that's not enough: there is even a 244Mbps AVCHD Intra Hack, as outlined by Driftwood: "It's stable and with good lighting conditions can look amazing."

eosHD recommends: "AVCHD Intra at such high bitrates can be tricky to edit so I recommend transcoding it to ProRes 4-4-4 first."

The Panasonic GH2 turns out to be the currently best Video-DSLr out there, although it is not even a DSLR. The micro-four thirds sensor is much smaller than a full-frame sensor, but the video footage that this great camera produces is far superior to those from lets say the Canon EOS 5D MKII - no moires, no aliasing and a much better video codec: AVCHD. Besides the obvious facts, the GH2 gets hacked extensively: Vitaliy Kiselev first hacked the GH1 and after that the Panasonic GH2.

With the PTOOL firmware manipulation tool, you can get the following improvements, among many others:

- Change Video Bitrates
- Improved GOP patches.
- Improved MJPEG size patches.
- change the 30min recording restriction
- lots of other changes

Patching the firware was possible, after a GH2 Firmware update leaked.

Here is a short overview on what to do in 10 steps:

1) Get a Patch from the extensive patch repository.
2) Load the GH2 1.0E firmware
3) Check all necessary patches, Version increment must be always checked.
4) Save firmware. Just change last digit to any number you want. (e.g. GH2__V11.bin)
5) Copy firmware to root of SD card. Fully charge you battery. Do not even attempt to use AC coupler!
6) Power off your camera if it was on.
7) Power on camera. After this press (not hold) green play button.
8) You'll see hourglass and prompt to update.
9) Press down arrow and after this Menu/set.
10) Wait until upgrade will be completed.

happy modding!

[UPDATE] Nikonrumors posted More Nikon D800 bits and pieces: 100% Viewfinder coverage, improved AF with face recognition, SD+CF dual memory card slots as well as a USB 3.0 possibility. The question remains, why not CFAST? On another post, the ISO range is said to be 100 – 6400, ISO LO @ 50 and ISO HI-2 @ 25600. We can only wait and see...

This is an information from our Partner, 5uper.net:

In Autumn of 2011 the Festival Coded Cultures takes place for the 4th time, this year focusing on the topic "City as Interface". Ever since the foundation of the Festival in 2004 lay the general emphasis on creative practices of cultural development on the intersections of art, technology, science and design. It is our concern to decode de- velopments, concepts and projects in those “coded” structures of digital and (new) media production, which won’t open up easily to broader audiences. Over the years the alignment of Coded Cultures and its variations were orientated internation- ally with the focus on eastern Europe in 2004, Brasil in the following years and Japan in 2009. This year, Coded Cultures involves mainly participants from Europe with prominent attendees such as transmediale from Berlin, Media Lab Prado from Madrid, Amber Festival from Istanbul and the Enter Festival from Prague.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
CODED CULTURES was initiated by the group »5uper.net«: a network of producers, theorists, artists, designers, architects and programmers, which is active in the field of knowledge-work based on digital media related forms of art and culture. Recently, the Book "Coded Cultures: New Creative Practices Out of Diversity" published by Springer.

http://codedcultures.net
http://5uper.net
http://www.facebook.com/codedcultures
http://twitter.com/codedcultures
Coded Cultures: New Creative Practices Out of Diversity

Steps to install OSX Lion:
1. Get the "GM" (Golden Master) of Lion via torrent
2. Get an EFI Boot Loader
3. Get a decent 8GB USB thumb drive and install the Golden Master on there.
4. Install using iBoot.

You can get detailed information on installing Mac OSX Lion 10.7 by reading the geeknizer blog howto.

[UPDATE] tonymacx86 showed how to Install OS X 10.7 Lion on any Supported Intel Core 2 or Core i based PC with xMove + MultiBeast. Furthermore, there is a Mac OSX Lion v10.7.2-HOTiSO that should also boot from any PC. Don't forget that you need to buy Apple Mac OS X Lion from the App Store to legally use it.

Which type are you?

• the collector: two 750GB SATAII Drives
• fast, but not furious: 256GB SSD SATAIII drive + 750GB HDD in the optical drive slot
• the caretaker: 256GB SSD SATAIII drive + 500GB SATAII hybrid drive in the optical drive slot
• speed enthusiast: 256GB SSD SATAIII drive + 256GB SSD SATAII drive in the optical drive slot
• humongous and rich: 512GB SSD SATAIII drive + 512GB SSD SATAII drive in the optical drive slot

The recommended steps are to select your setup, get an OptiBay, choose an external casing for your optical drive and get your hands dirty. Read our recommendations and tell us which type you are!

The new MCE OptiBay was created for users who want as much hard drive capacity as possible inside their MacBook Pro, MacBook, PowerBook G4, iMac, or Mac mini. Period

256GB SSD SATA III 6Gbps Drive

The first SATA port on the current MacbookPro models is a true 6Gbps port. That means you can mount SATA III 6Gbps devices without any much trouble into your soon-to-be-blazingly fast aluminium portable.

Recommendations: either wait for the OCZ 240 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive (which sadly is not officially released yet, but already got a great review by Anand from AnandTech) or you can alternatively get a 256 GB Crucial RealSSD C300 which is aleady available and also shows great results

OptiBay: original or replica

The OptiBay is a size adapter, that makes your optical drive slot usable for other "normal" 2 1/2" drives, such as HDD and SDD drives. Unfortunately the SATA port where the optical drive is connected on the new MacBook Pro 2011 Models is only capable of 3Gbps. Still it would be possible to insert SSD drives as well, if you are brave.

You can either get the original MCE OptiBay (which sells for around $100 on the MCE Page), or you can safely get a replica OptiBay, which are starting at $9, sometimes there are even cheaper offers on ebay UK or ebay USA.

750GB Second HDD Drive recommendation: Western Digital WD7500BPKT Scorpio Black 750 GB

If you are careful about your SSD wear (having lots of "traffic" on your disk shortens the lifespan of your SSD) or are downloading torrent like crazy (bittorrent clients are quite a load on the drives), you might consider putting a Hard Disk instead of a SSD in your Optical Drive Slot.

Western Digital WD7500BPKT Scorpio Black 750 GB ~106€ in Europe, $109.99 in the USA

Recommended second SDD for the OptiBay: OCZ Vertex 2 Extended

If you are brave and have the necessary bucks, why not go for a second SDD in your MacBook Pro? We can definitely recommend the OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 2 Extended SSD
, since we had two drives already mounted in a 2010 MacBook Pro. Yes, that is a fast setup. If you want to have a mobile power workstation that is suited for high end audio and video production, this is definitely the way to go.

external Optical Drive enclosure

Since you might want to still use your optical drive from time to time, you should consider getting an external casing for it. We can definitely recommend those external enclosures, since they are dead cheap and do exactly what you need them to do: host your Apple internal drive and make it an external one. Recommended: USB2.0 Slim External Enclosure Case

Possible Extra: get an external bluray drive

If you don't care so much about the size of your external drive, you can also get an external BluRay Drive, to also watch your HD Movies. Recommendation: the Plextor 6X Ext USB Bd Combo

"lion is booting with some old xpc version" ~ Netkas

Some people are claiming to boot the recent Mac OSX 10.7 Lion with the XPC Bootloader project. More and more voices are popping up, so I am just pointing in the right direction, since "Any and all information about downloading and installing Lion, as well as any details are under Non-Disclosure Agreement from Apple.". You probably find updates on Netkas' Blog as well.

UPDATE: see a posting/ short guide on a popular board as well: Mac OS X 10.7 Lion [Beta/HowTo]

http://goto10.org/mode-v-noise-at-craftivism/

"The workshop is aimed at participants with basic experience in programming, scripting, or markup languages, even if it’s just (X)HTML/CSS. You do not have to be an experienced programmer, but if you are, that’s good too. As long as you are not afraid to work in a terminal, you’ll be fine! In general, we are looking for people who have already experienced the “culture shock” of using plain text to describe a process and want to take this further or discover creative programming using free software. The workshop will be adapted to the participants’ experience and profiles, but do not hesitate to contact us for extra details or if you are not sure you will fit. You will go home with the software and code you wrote during the workshop, and encouraged to share it and develop it further!

At the end of the workshop, everything will be left on site in the gallery and available online as part of the Craftivism exhibition at Arnolfini (12 December 2009 – 14 February 2010)."