Hasta La Gadget!

Canon isn’t the only game in town when it comes to hacking camera firmware. The famous CHDK firmware hacks now have a rival, at least if you are shooting with a Panasonic GH1, and especially if you are using the Micro Four Thirds camera to shoot video.

The hack, called PTool, doesn’t add nearly as many features as the Canon hacks, but what it does is startling. With PTool, you can up the video bitrate of the GH1 from a pedestrian 20Mbit to 32MBit in AVCHD. If you opt for Motion JPEG (MJPEG), you can shoot at an astonishing 50 Mbit/sec at a full 1080p. This, according to testers, offers better quality footage than you get from the EOS 5D MkII. Above you can see an example. To view it in its full HD glory, click through to the Vimeo page

There’s more. You can choose to encode at a frame-rate of 24p (24 fps) for footage that looks like film. This works without “pulldown”, which is a way of finagling the amount of frames you have by doubling some of them to convert to different frame rates.

You can also, if you are feeling brave, enable short shots to encode at a crazy 100Mbit/sec, which further decreases compression from the raw sensor data. And you will need to be brave. These hacks are still experimental and choosing settings is a balance between quality and stability.

There are other tweaks to be made. The 30-minute limit on video shots has been removed (although this is probably moot as no movie has shots of more than a few minutes anyway), you can change the language of the camera interface and you can use third party batteries: the Panasonics actually perform a check to see if you have an official battery, forcing you into paying high prices (I paid €80, or almost $100, for a spare battery for my GF1).

How do you perform this magic? Following the instructions on the GH1 hackers wiki, you download the Windows PTool software (which works on the Mac under emulation). Then you download the latest official firmware from Panasonic and load it into PTool.

This gives a simple list of possible tweaks, and you just check the boxes next to the ones you want and then save the new firmware to an SD card. Next, the scary part begins.

This is where PTool hack differs greatly from the Canon CHDK. With the CHDK, the custom firmware remains on the SD card ind is loaded in every time the camera starts up. If you decide you want to revert, you just format the card, or swap in another, and you’re back to normal. It is completely risk-free.

With the Panasonic, you actually have to flash the firmware onto the camera, completely replacing the official firmware. You cannot revert to a clean, factory-fresh status, although you can re-apply the PTool firmware with all of the tweaks switched off. This has the side effect of giving you a non-standard firmware version number, a tell-tale sign that you have been up to no good. This may or may not invalidate your warranty.

Good news for owners of the Panasonic GF1, too, the awesome little mirrorless compact that you and I both love. This hack will work on our camera, too, although with one difference. The GF1’s sensor is physically incapable of shooting at full 1080p resolution. Everything else should work, though.

Beginners GH1 Custom Firmware Guide [EOS HD Wiki]

PTool FAQ, including feature list [DVX User forum. Thanks to Paul Weber]

The PTool Manual [DVX User forum]

Why the (hacked) Panasonic GH1 is a better video camera than the Canon5DMk2 [Jay Shaffer]

3rd Party firmware transforms wimpy GH1 into Optimus Prime [Philip Bloom]

Video [Andrew Reid/Vimeo]