Recently, I landed a TV Show titled Team Toons for the Cartoon Network. As our budget is tight and the show requires some of the most quick but difficult camera rigs (inside school lockers, stuck to ceilings, mounted on bikes, etc), we opted to shoot on the Panasonic GH2 Lumix cameras. You're thinking why would a network shoot on a 900 dollar still camera?Enter the GH2 Hack by Russian hacker Vitaly Kiselev. This hack boosts the camera's 20 mbs bit rate to over 200 mbs. In a word it's insane! 20 mbs with the Lumix chip was already producing sharper and better images than the competitors, the Canon 7d and 5d. But at 10 times that, we're in the territory of high end digital imaging systems costing several times as much (starting at 20 grand).
Though nothing in life is free (except the hack itself). Figuring out how to install it in a world bereft of manuals and gleaning info from a blogosphere seemingly only inhabited by computer geeks makes figuring this out to the layman like me a somewhat epic task. Like an infant's first steps. After much swearing to the heavens, staring blankly at computers screens, emailing every geek I know, I still could not figure out how to install it.
Enter Steve Sherrick, a DIT from Boston I've know for a few years and my director, Will Wedig, both computer savvy but still able to communicate in plain English, the hack was successfully installed. The results of the first tests (see sample photo - video links to come) I did were nothing short of breathtaking. Here was a camera the size of a couple of cigarette packs, taking images ready for prime time drama.
Too good to be true? Perhaps. Stay tuned.
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