5DmkII Magic Lantern Raw Alpha 1

[Ted Ramasola]

Took the family out fireworks watchin so I shot some 4th of July fireworks in Teas using ML raw, recorded some audio using h264 video.

Fireworks for the 4th of July in Allen Texas - YouTube

Fireworks for the 4th of July in Allen Texas on Vimeo

[Jon Fairhurst]

This weekend, we shot some greenscreen in anger with the 5D2 ML RAW. How'd it go?

Great!

First, it was EASIER to use on set (for our application) than it was to use h.264 - now that we've practiced the menu sequence enough to know the process by heart. Our setup is pretty simple. We have a 12' x 8' greenscreen wall lit by six fluorescent fixtures, three above and three below. The camera is locked down. The actor is a good distance from the greenscreen to minimize spill. To match an outdoor background, we used one 650W tungsten Fresnel and a 1000W open face at a distance through a diffuser for the fill. No kickers or hair lights needed.

Previously, we would really work it to set up the camera. We would use high saturation to get as bold a green as possible. We'd use low contrast to get a wide dynamic range. We'd color balance to the tungsten light and pull the saturation back down after cutting the key in post. We did everything we could to pull the cleanest possible key. And with h.264, the results were okay, but not great.

With RAW, setup was way faster. Set the exposure so the highlights are within a stop of clipping and you're done. The deeper focus of the 1:1 crop helped keep hair sharp. I don't recall the ISO, but we ran f/3.5 on a 16-35/2.8L II at about 22mm.

Using Keylight, with one click, we could get a reasonably clean key over white. A couple of minutes of additional masking (to deal with falloff/imperfections on the screen), some level tweaking, and fine color correction and the key matches the scene.

I now *get it*. The advantage of RAW isn't that you get to be creative in post; it's that you don't have to waste the crew's time in production. Instead of worrying about camera settings, we concentrated on light angles and ratios.

In post, we were able to transfer the data fast enough. With the concept proven, we've ordered a second card.

Still, we had some teething pains with files over 4GB. The real bottleneck seems to be the debayering speed for creating compressed DNGs and for creating proxies. But as long as we can offload the cards fast enough to dual stores, we can keep the production rolling, and that's what counts. The part of the process that we need to improve can ultimately be done when we sleep.

Any concern about limited chroma resolution is moot. We shot hair flying around and the motion blur of fast-moving hands without a trace of green in the final result. If anything, we need to reduce contrast, soften the image, and add some diffusion to get the keys to match filmic backgrounds.

So far, so good...

[Ted Ramasola]

Just want to update 5D mkII users that for now DO NOT USE a128gig 1000x or 1050x UDMA7 CF card for Magic Lantern.

Tests I have been doing with techsupport from Komputerbay shows us that the 5DmkII

can accept the fast cards ONLY WHEN USING CANON FIRMWARE and for shooting stills and H264 .MOV files.

BUT the card CANNOT BE USE TO UPDATE FIRMWARE, even the firmware from Canon can't be "seen" by the 5D mkII

also MAGIC LANTERN FIRMWARE CANNOT BE "SEEN" BY THE 5dMKII, even if you use EOScard to make it bootable.

So far we are doing the tests using Komputerbay 128 gig 1000x and 1050x cf cards,

If you are using a 128 gig on the mkII + Magic Lantern please share if its 1000x or less, also if its UDMA7 or less.

[Ted Ramasola]

After some troubleshooting of CF cards with KomputerBay techsupport I've finally made 128gig CF cards to work with a 5DmkII and the 7D.

The issue now is NOT capacity but CF chip firmware.

I've tested a couple of 1000X, 1050X CF cards including a 128gig 800x which KomputerBay said they will not be releasing anymore.

The current 128gig 1000X cf cards now have the Magic LAntern compatible firmware.

Though based on my benchmarks of the 1000x cards, the 128gig cards are slightly slower than the 64gig and 32gig, but still enough to record raw video on both 5dmkII and 7D.

[Ted Ramasola]

As an update.

There are some gains made with recent builds.

Using Sept. 26 build for mkII

You can now set Stills mode to RAW even with raw_rec ON.

This is good for those wanting to snap a good quality Still with raw video module ON.

[Ted Ramasola]

To update, latest build, oct 28.

Now you can preview your raw video IN COLOR playback in-camera.

[Ted Ramasola]

Just to add an update, the last couple of builds right up to the latest Nov. 3, the RAW Video in-camera playback is also improved.

After choosing file to view for playback, pressing SET starts the playback.

Press Pic Styles to show Controls, PLAY, PAUSE, HI(in color but slow),LO(grayscale faster) USE SET to SELECT.

Press Pic Styles again to remove Controls from screen. Press HALF Shutter to STOP Preview.