What am I missing? (GH2 hacks not spanning)

gcavy1

Just need to know if this is an SD card issue. (this is my first time hacking my GH2)
I'm using a 16 gb SanDisk Extreme Pro (95mb/s) card. (I also tried a run of the mill SanDisk 16gb Extreme card 45 mb/s)

I realize that neither of these cards are listed in the wiki concerning cards but the Extreme Pro is supposed to be a good card. Anyhow: I first tried Sanity 5.1 My record time in 24p 24H was really short. (maybe 20 seconds or so?) switching to 24p 24L yielded about a minute of record time. I tried the full manual mode and ran the "HD" setting for quality and got about 2 minutes. Everytime is says that the record time has exceeded the write capacity of the card. Oddly, I seemed to get better results with the cheaper card. It ran well over 3 minutes on 24p 24L, but still just over a minute on 24H.

I also tried Cake version 2.2 (I think) on the Extreme Pro card and it was terrible, record times were like 10 seconds or less. 720P was like 8 seconds.

The reason I picked both those patches is I wanted reasonable bit rates/files sizes and good reliability and spanning.

Any ideas? Could it really be the cards?
Just for the record, after loading the patches my camera said "this card is not formated to this camera and not suitable for recording" (or something along those lines) is that typical?

If there is a thread that deals with this just point me there, no offense taken...my searches didn't turn up a clear answer.

thanks! -Greg

Vitaliy_Kiselev

@jasonp

A new topic isn't always necessary when you have a simple problem or misunderstanding,

LOL. It is ok, beginners category is made for such topics.

gcavy1

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm new to this forum but a long time member of other types of forums so I'm aware of the new guy syndrome, so no offense taken.

I had read quite a bit before attempting to load my first hack, including parts of the links above. I'll do some more reading however and post back here if I can't seem to get my camera working correctly. I figured my issue was not the SD card so I must be missing something else. (as far as I can tell I'm doing everything correctly.)

thanks again.

gcavy1

Let me ask a couple of quick questions if you'll entertain me:

Should I be formatting the card in the camera? Or on the computer?
If I should be formatting the card in the camera before adding the hacked firmware, where do I put the new firmware? in the DCIM folder? MISC?
Should the file use _ or __ in the name. When renaming the firmware version I took the existing name and simply changed the last digit (as all the tutorials say to do).

thanks I think this might clear up my problem.

tetakpatak

(1) first in your PC (FAT32), after that in your camera
(2) In card root, besides folders DCIM, MISC and PRIVATE, so you see it as fourth symbol
(3) Correct, just changing the last digit of the file name (the option "version increment" in the Ptool must be checked when saving new firmware -it is by default checked already-)

balazer

Several possibilities come to mind:

The camera is in a bad state. Do Menu, Setup, Reset. This is always the first thing you should try when something unexplained happens.
You applied the hack incorrectly in PTool. You should load the original firmware image, then load the hack settings from an .ini file, and then save the new firmware image without changing any of the settings in PTool. Don't touch any of the check boxes or change any of the values.
Your SD cards are defective or counterfeit. Try a write test in your PC using HD_Speed: http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=20 Using a good USB 2.0 card reader, the write speed should stay above 10 MB/s. Using the GH2 as a USB card reader, the write speed should be around 6 MB/s. Testing with a UHS USB-3.0 card reader may not be relevant, since the GH2 doesn't support UHS mode. Try a couple full-overwrite formattings using the SD Card Association Formatter and see if it helps: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/ Try different SD cards.
Your camera is defective. (possible, but not likely)

Formatting in the camera is best. It's not necessary to format in your PC first, aside from the previously mentioned full-overwrite formatting using the SD Card Association Formatter.

gcavy1

thanks for the info.
I'll do a format in the camera, this was not something I was doing as I assumed it somehow would then have the panasonic firmware as native on the card and make adding a hacked firmware difficult. I'll also do a full reset to make sure everything is good. (this would make sense as I was using it today after resetting it to the panasonic firmware and it was having trouble playing back videos in-camera.) I think I did apply the hack correctly in ptool, just did not explain it correctly on here. If all this doesn't work, I'll do a speed test on my cards to see if they're having problems, but I'd guess its as simple as formatting the card in the camera so it knows how to read it. thanks so much for your help. I'll post back soon.

DrDave

Try Flowmotion on the "L" setting which has a lower bit rate. That patch is extremely reliable at spanning. If that does not work, the problem may lie elsewhere.

driftwood

Most settings will probably span on the L (lower) switch as the bitrate is normally set much lower which seems to be the main cause of span over/writes to the next file. Try a few settings out and report back.

DrDave

@driftwood, which of your patches has the lowest bitrate in the L setting?

gcavy1

Thought I'd do a quick update here. (sorry my internet has been down since the middle of last week.) I was successful yesterday in installing Sanity (as far as I can tell). I followed everyone's recommendations.
Not sure if its out there, but I'm reasonably tech competent and was unsure of where to format the card (computer verses camera) before loading the hack.
If we could update a sticky or something with the info that the card should be formatting in the camera, that would help. thanks.

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