Many of the Panasonic cameras have had their firmware inspected for video features. The video looks quite good to an average user like me, but dedicated folks on a budget want top-level quality from a bargain camera. Apparently they have succeeded to some degree that they can see, but for the most part the video looks very similar in before/after shots I have seen.
However it's not just the video specs. Beyond the MB/second bitrate one can also boost the audio quality. That sounded more appealing to me - especially since I was about to record a piano concert for the player and her family. Having a better audio track on a camera with no microphone jack would be a good thing.And so I looked into personal-view.com and its many levels of hacking on dozens of cameras.
My first stop was the GalaXian hack from user 'driftwood', which moved several steps forward on nearly every parameter. I think I took the settings as given.. which for me was a mistake. The setting boost makes the video unwatchable on the camera! That might have been fine if I'd had time to test everything, but to learn this on the day of the event was too much to ask - so the hacked camera was set up as the 'B' camera rather than the main shooter. The video turned out fine in fact, but it was unsettling.
I then tried some other settings, and even tried to reload the original firmware. Luck was not on my side in those endeavors.
After that I went with a different hack, the 'natural3' set from user bkmcwd. It had a different error message with mp4 mode, claiming my card write speed was too slow (the AVCHD mode seemed fine). The camera then locked up on playback and I despaired of seeing the GX1 work again. (It turns out that others have reported similar camera lockups and shooting/deleting still images can reset things - now they tell me!).
Finally I put the natural3 back on the camera and it was not locking up, and I found a V3 SD card (at a great price!) hoping to get that error message to relent. Alas, luck was again not with me, even though the card speed should be sufficient; perhaps the GX1 was not the 'natural3' intended target and that has been my problem. Most users of that hack use an earlier GH camera.
After several more attempts to reset the camera to Lumix-standard v1.1 firmware I looked again at the GalaXian hack. I lowered some of the high-demand settings for mp4 images and tried again. Now the camera records both mp4 and AVCHD without hassle or lockup.
And I cannot play them back on the camera!
So at last, after further reading, I loaded firmware 1.1 and boosted the AVCHD settings but left MP4 settings untouched. At this I finally found peace: videos both work, stills look fine, nothing freezes on playback.
Maybe it will even work the same way tomorrow?
