@Wilrus Given the recording times you are looking for, here are a few to look at.

Sanity 5.1

No Adverse Affects

Cake (a little higher bitrate than the other two, though)

Basic answer is this. The patches let you use the higher ISOs, which is great for low-light. But their main enhancement is to enable higher bitrates. This means that the camera performs less data compression, and the motion in the images is much cleaner and more precise. This doesn't make the camera perform much better in low-light conditions. It may make it easier to brighten things in post, because the images have less noise. But for low-light shooting, your best bet is to use higher ISOs and fast lenses.

As for patches that give you long recording times... well, the patches enable higher bitrates, which eats up memory storage, and the spanning also becomes unreliable. The only memory card that spans reliably at really high bitrates is the Sandisk Extreme Pro 64gig memory card. If you don't have that card-- if you're using a perfectly good Class 10 card-- then the only patch you should use is Cake. That patch spans reliably for me on the lesser cards, and you get decent bitrates.

But don't count out using the camera's native firmware. It's still pretty good.

@wilrus Brian is already sending you in the right direction, so I will just expand on this a bit. :)

Getting the most out of all of this starts with a clear understanding of the building blocks.

PTool: Lets you change Firmware settings. Each named "setting" (like Sanity or Cake) is a collection of values that are specified for those Firmware settings. The higher ISOs that Brian mentioned are single box that can be checked or unchecked, even if you want to use the factory default settings for the firmware on just about everything else.

Spanning: The GH2 uses a maximum file size of 4GBs. That translates into 4096 MBs, or 8 times that if you are calculating in megabits instead of megabytes. When you look at a card in Windows or OS X, it tells you the free space in GBs. The settings on here are specified in mbps for their maximum video bitrate over time (though they can spike higher and are often lower). To find out how long it takes a given setting to fill up 4096 MBs, divide the mbps by 8, and then divide 4096 by this number to find the recording time.

For example: A setting with 4.096 MB/s would give 1000 seconds of recording time before it filled up a file.

When that file fills up, the GH2 tries to create a new one to follow it in the series. If it succeeds, there is no gap in the audio or video. This process of continuing the recording from one file to the next is called spanning. Be aware that it is something that is fairly demanding for the GH2 and the card and that different settings vary widely in their ability to consistently execute it (and their requirements for doing so). The factory default settings are generally reliable in this regard, with some rare exceptions discussed on this forum.

Bitrates: The settings vary greatly in their bitrates. At the lowest end is Sanity 5.1 and the factory defaults. Sanity rarely records at the maximum bitrate it specifies. Their are settings that have bitrates over 5 times higher than the factory defaults, so that means you run out of space on the card 5 times as quickly. Givenn your criteria for record times, there are very few settings worth considering.

EDIT 1-

Differences in Settings

Other than their reliability in spanning and what cards they will record well with, the different named settings vary in several ways. The differences may be subtle or dramatic depending on what you are filming and how you are doing so.

Macroblocking: When a setting runs out of available bitrate or considers a particular detail to be unimportant, it renders it as a low detail square (or series of squares). This is called macroblocking. The hacked settings often have a lower chance of encountering macroblocking than the factory default/stock setting ones. If you notice macroblocking your footage with stock settings, there is a good chance that one of the named settings on this site will do better.

GOP: During recordings, the GH2 can record each frame as one of three types: I, P or B. To keep things basic, we'll think of I-frames as "keyframes" where the entire picture is decribed (just like a JPEG) while P and B frames describe what has changed since the frame before. When there isn't much change from frame to frame, P and B frames allow you to either save a lot of bitrate (since they only specify the changes) or to make the I-frames really big (since you don't need to describe the whole picture over and over again if not much is changing).

So why is GOP important? Because a setting that is most efficient when very little changes can run into problems when there is a lot of motion (these have low GOPs or even GOP1 "intra" where every frame is described in whole). Settings that are very efficient when there is a lot of motion are potentially less efficient in static shots where little changes (these are high GOP settings, including the factory default settings).

If you throw a lot of motion at the factory default settings, especially combined with high detail, odds are high that you will end up with macro blocking.

Noise: Noise is affected by the GOP, bitrate and other aspects specified in a given setting. With a GOP1/intra setting, the noise pattern gets updated every single frame. With higher GOPs, the change in the noise pattern from frame to frame is sometimes considered to be "insufficient change" for the codec to update it, depending on the setting - this is common with the stock settings. When there is limited bitrate available, the setting may also avoid allocating to much data to noise to make sure there is enough available for other parts of the image. That is part of what the extra bandwidth on some of the settings gets used for.

@Wilrus Yes, you can revert to the factory settings. Just start PTool, load the basic firmware, make sure the increment box is check for the version and save that firmware. Using that BIN file, you can revert at any time.

By the way, in my experience the recording times for Sanity 5.1 are often longer than with Cake. Try both and check the bitrates on the files you end up with.

EDIT: It is very important to check your real world results and not to just rely on the "recording time left" indicator on your GH2. The recording time indicator is always conservative - you will have at least that much time left on the card but it can often be more.

Don't forget @cbrandin 44Mbps setting. Very good for long recording times.

@DrDave Oh god the brandy! No, if you want low bitrate with a tad more quality than stock Long GOP Chris's setting has always pleased people. Personally, Ive never used it. As you know, none of my 24h settings go below 50M :-) BTW I'm not knocking low bitrate hacks.

On a class 10 card it didn't span reliably in 24H. I don't know about the faster cards. 24L spans.

Thank you everyone for all your feedback and advise! @driftwood as a non bias middle man, what do you believe would be more reliable for the job, @cbrandin 's @ 44mbs, or Flow Motion 2? (im guessing i pick between weather its H or L like i would normally on the camera... hacks dont add extra menus or anything do they? (i'm going to keep this thread running until my memory card arrives in the post, as i cant really test anything until then >.<) a huge thanks to everyone again who's participated again, even if you.

(for the record, the camera would be focused and left on manual focus, and i could leave iDynamic and iResolution off too)

If your choices are between my old 44mbs patch or Lee's Flow Motion 2, I'd go with Flow Motion 2 - it's much newer and Lee put a lot of work into it. I produced the 44mbs patch sort of to get people started. There are several guys here who have produced newer and better patches.

@Wilrus Non biased? Spizz (co-developed with bkmwcd), Lee's FM2, DREWnet Trial 7 (or 8), each tried on L settings. Also a lot of people like Ralph's Sanity and Cake from Balazer get good reports. Try them all on a few scenes over an hour or two and decide what YOU prefer.