Spent on discussion or on hacking?

Yes, Brian202020, absolutely right!

I'm not urgent, but the obsession about reaching useless highest bitrates and deepest details is slowing down the 2 biggest things you mention. Vitaliy, Chris, LPowell and others gave us many important options with their work, but I think that they are becoming a slaves of endless tests of those bitrates and few other parameters which will never give the "magic" of the cinematic picture.

There are a lot of discussions showing many advantages of GH-series over Canon DSLRs, but Canon DSLRs still keep higher prices, why??? - Generally because of the patches made for them like Techicolor Cinestyle, CINEMA Picture Style and etc. which concern the PICTURE characterization!

@JPB1138

I see no point going into circles. We are working on it. But it is not an easy task.

A flat look for GH2 is really what many pro users want for GH2. Especially to recover some of the highlights that are often pruned off.

"Smooth" mode is probably my favorite film mode but I have noticed that some specific green hues are not properly captured using this profile. The disatisfying thing about GH2 picture styles is that none of them are perfect, you have to pick the less bad of them. Cinema mode brings strange yellowish highlights and darker shadows. (it is a failure to me) Technicolor Cinestyle is really the best flat picture style for DSLR. (but I prefer GH2 sharpness from far) Cineplus style is not a flat, it is very contrasty, it may be filmic but it's "already baked" style (at the opposite of the flat philosophy). Cheers

Respect to Vitaliy ! Can't wait to have the new 1.1 firmware hacked !

For real. I wish we could get an organized donation going, with a specific goal. I'm sure people have donated... but for the extreme amount of time and effort something like this requires, It'd be nice if we could figure out the kind of resources required for VK to have others help him on it etc. I would be very willing to donate again if we have an organized goal in mind. I'm sure it doesn't all come down to money... but I bet it sure helps.

@producer, I reckon you have to spend every lunchtime going through the posts on personalview to work this stuff out. There are gems in here.

I've now done 42 mini-projects with the GH2 and I'm no where near the quality of the stuff that's in the showcase.

A good friend of mine has given me two 40 min session on colour grading and I've worked through Davinci tutorials, yet the colour grading I see here still eludes me (colour ninjas please post more ;) )

Take a look at the GH2 verus Arri stuff to see how close the GH2 can get. Mr Driftwood is using different patches for different situations.

I'm going to post on sound shortly as I've been testing a prototype muff for the GH2.

I agree, with pre crushed baked in color, adding higher bit rate doesn't really add much to the final result. But when and if a log profile is available (Maybe Panasonic would give us one in the GH-3, would cost them nothing but some code). We will see how the GH-x high bitrate/GOP1 beats the others. Other than RAW or 10,12,16 bit codecs

@Vitaliy_Kiselev, well thanks for hanging in there. I wish people / non-programmers could visualize how unbelievably difficult something like this is. If they only knew, no one would ever dare ask in such an entitled way... or throw out impatient requests for "custom picture profiles".

@producer, VK responded to a separate post saying this has long been discussed and that it is being worked on. I as well, have witnessed this topic come up many times, to which my post referred. I wasn't actually talking to you guy :-)

Of course we don't realized how difficult it is, some people are "end users" here ! We don't even have a clue. We are not within the Matrix... I'm pretty sure all members have a huge respect toward the hack development and wat is being done.

Some ideas that are talked about are "wishes" not even "requests". I was talking about what "Panasonic" offers in terms of picture styles compared to "Canon". (comparing the 2 companies) As concerns topics that as arealdy been discussed, I guess anyone can understand that if you are following 3 or 4 forums from time to time you can't follow through all the topics. So please be kind (and forgiving) :) Sharing views between colorist, cinematographers, vfx operators and programers is great.

GH3 released already, but still there is not any patch which tends even a little bit to such a flat picture style in GH2, although this was discussed for long time. Obviously it's not only difficult, it seems to be impossible. Or maybe the too many released patches for higher bitrate and quality - most of them similar to each other - eat the time that should be spent for at least one type of flat style for GH series. Hope such a patch will be released before GH5 appears...

I think if you want the advantages of a truly flat picture, look to BMCC.