I didn’t realize how long it had been since I last went for a hike until I noticed that I had no hiking footage from the Panasonic GH1.  Today I decided to rectify that.

I recently hacked the GH1 and have been testing the 100Mbps Max Latitude firmware patch for a few weeks now and have been very happy with the 1080p output.  However, today I wanted to shoot some 60p, which the aforementioned patch does not support.  I did a bit of searching and opted to test out the 75Mbps GH1 Peak Reliability Patch, made by the same creator of the 100Mbps Max Latitude patch.

The 75Mpbs patch supports 720/60p and based on the name, I’m guess it’s supposed to be pretty stable.  Unfortunately, it does not support native 24p when shooting 1080, so I enabled this option when building the firmware patch.  Messing with settings will likely lead to lower stability, but hey, you don’t make an progress without some experimentation right?

Results

Let’s start with the obvious issue that plagued the GH1 from its inception– highly detailed scenes.  The 17Mbps bitrate of the stock GH1 is simply too low for video without codec breakdown, especially when shooting highly detailed scenes.  The firmware patches for the GH1 are a solution to this issue and truly make the GH1 an incredible tool.  That being said, shooting in the middle of the forest will definitely be a test for the hacked GH1.

Reliability

Right off the bat, reliability was an issue.  Though I haven’t tested the stock settings of the 75Mbps patch, I’m pretty certain all reliability issues were due to me enabling native 24p output.  There could have been an issue with the Transcend class 10 card that I use, but I’ve never had a problem with it before.

In truth, it was a good thing that experienced reliability issues from the start.  I’d say the error rate was 5-10%, which was enough to keep me mindful of taking shorter clips so that when a crash did happen, I would only lose a little bit of footage rather than a really long shot.  Breaking up the clips will also help in editing, as I won’t have to sift through long clips to find the parts that I want to use.

Despite the sporadic issues with reliability, I was able to get (most of) the shots that I wanted and shot about 40 minutes of footage total.

Image Quality

Admittedly, I haven’t shot a lot of 60p up until now.  In fact, this was the first time I shot 60p on the GH1, but after the nice results I had shooting 60p with the GH2 the other day, I wanted was keen on exploring this mode a bit more.

By default, the GH1 has a maximum bitrate of 17Mbps for 720/60p footage.  However, with the 75Mbps patch applied, the average video bitrate was 45Mbps!  That’s more than 2.5x more bandwidth to store each frame and should hopefully result in higher image quality (or at least less codec breakdown).

I haven’t had a chance to really go through much of my footage yet, but here are some frames from today’s shooting (saved to JPG with minimal compression for the web):

Conclusions

It’s too soon to make any real conclusions, but so far I haven’t found any total scene breakdown that would occur very easily with the stock GH1.  I’ll update once I’ve gone through the footage more thoroughly.