Panasonic GH2 Driftwood/Vitaly Patches 176Mbps AVCHD Intra up to 244Mbps Intra: A poor man’s RED?

Video: Tsawout Spit – Gh2 Test (driftwood 176mb gop1 hack) from mark wyatt on Vimeo.

There seems to be no day without any surprises with the Panasonic GH2. The latest hot-shit is a hack to get 176Mbps AVCHD Intra up and running on the camera. Right now there's no possibility to record in 25p but there are attempts by vitaly and others, so let's see what the future holds.

What is AVCHD Intra?
"AVCHD Intra is usually recorded to extremely expensive P2 cards on high end cameras and here it is on a consumer camera with an SD card. [...] This is a codec that uses i-frames only unlike consumer AVCHD. Every frame from the sensor is stored. Standard AVCHD is a Long-GOP compression format and works by estimating and guessing at frames in-between ‘real’ images but Intra doesn’t. [...] AVCHD Intra is very good for heavy colour grading, fast action, hand held footage and green screen VFX work. You certainly get a better result from AVCHD Intra on the GH2 than by outputting from any DSLR’s HDMI feed to a external recorder as well." (via eosHD)

How does it compare?
eosHD has a comparison on AVCHD intra 100Mbps vs 24Mbit AVCHD.

And if that's not enough: there is even a 244Mbps AVCHD Intra Hack, as outlined by Driftwood: "It's stable and with good lighting conditions can look amazing."

eosHD recommends: "AVCHD Intra at such high bitrates can be tricky to edit so I recommend transcoding it to ProRes 4-4-4 first."