Does 7D Switch from 1080 to 480 when recordinng (as the 5D does)?

Yes, on the HDMI output, I presume you meant to say? The recording is 1080, of course.

Thanks for reading my mind Eric ;-) Yes I meant on the HDMI output. Well at least I know the 5D and 7D are similar in that respect. It just makes using the 5D a little challenging on the glidecam. I guess the thing to do is stop it down (5.6+) and keep the zoom lens wide
to maximize th DOF.

[ This should probably be moved to the 7D forum -- Chris? ]
Does 7D Switch from 1080 to 480 when recordinng (as the 5D does)?
Yes, on the HDMI output, I presume you meant to say?
That's not my experience with the 7D. The HDMI output remains 1080i, although the Info button becomes inop while recording, so it is not possible to toggle between the different overlay screens. This is a significant problem since only one of the HDMI output modes provides a near-fullscreen display (produced by calling lv_output_device( "1080full" ) on the 5D). They all have some amount of clutter, letter boxing and side pillars, but the one with no camera info give the largest amount to the image. As an aside, this is why Magic Lantern draws its own f-stop/shutter/ISO in the soft-matte region.

In an early post I tried to compute the actual size of the image display in this mode:
There are side-pillars on both sides of the 16:9 1080i signal, and then soft-mattes to show what portion of the 3:2 is the 16:9 recorded image.

So the effective resolution is even less than the 1080i signal might suggest. I haven't measured it exactly, but my estimate is that we lose about 150 pixels per side-pillar, leaving us with a 1620x911 useful image on the HDMI.

One minor change in this is that the soft-matte is much more opaque on the 7D than on the 5D. This means that there are two bitmap palette entries with varying alpha channels for when we have Magic Lantern running on the 7D.

Thanks Tramm. I think I will tough it out and stick with what I have (5D).
Its not enough to warrant spending $1500 I dont really have.