This firmware hack, which is not endorsed by Panasonic, is available via the website www.personal-view.com.

The Hack is not just one program you download and use but more like a program to hack your firmware and feed the hacked firmware with a configuration that determines the properties of the hacked camera (called a “patch”). That is both a strength but also a weakness because it is a science in itself not good for someone who just wants to get going. The reason for this is that for almost every improvement you pay a price, e.g. when you increase the bitrate of the camera (the amount of data used to compress one second of video) to get better quality, this can make the camera less reliable (it may freeze during a shot and ruin the filmed material for that particular shot). One configuration that may be the one that finally squeezes the last bit of quality out of your dimly lit shot might crash instantly when used panning over a busy street during the day. Changing that means updating the camera’s firmware, which is not a very light-weight process (you need a full battery and a formatted SD card with the configured hack and then 1-2 minutes of time for the update to proceed during which you are not supposed to touch the camera). So this is not something that you want to do during a wedding but may be OK while shooting your action sequence.

My advice, if you are a person who enjoys this kind of research and testing and risk to really get the optimal shot, go do it.

If the above scares you, and all you want to do is get started making your first film, use the camera as is at least for the beginning and find out for yourself if you really need the extra quality by running into the camera’s limitations and try some of the conservative settings available in the personal view forums and experiment before you do this on a real shoot.

My take on this is, the results are worth it if you have shots where you run into limitations of the camera, especially as far as low light is concerned (some people also say fast movement but I haven’t personally had shots where I had a problem with that so far). In many well-lit shots it will be hard to see the difference unless you stare at still frames with a magnifying glass. It is also likely that differences that are not apparent in raw material might become more visible when you use heavy color grading but if you’re not planning on doing that, you can rely on your eyes telling you it’s good enough.

If you read the discussions on www.personal-view.com, it is really hard to find out what’s right, because there is so much controversy. All I can say is, I cannot understand that there are still people who say, the hack is not improving quality. My only explanation for that is that they were lucky only to have filmed stuff where it does not make a difference (see above). On the other hand, as stated above, do not let all the hype force you into thinking that without the hack you are using a bad camera. That is certainly not the case either. I would recommend both cameras (GH1 and GH2) for super-low budget action filmers if there wasn’t a hack. But I have become completely addicted to that extra bit of quality in problematic shots that I am only using hacked GH1s and GH2s.

The patches I am currently using when filming my shorts are the following:

GH1: LPowell 75 MBps Reliable V.2

GH2: LPowell Flowmotion V. 2.02, Sanity V 5.1