Magic Lantern unlocks Canon 5D to shoot 14 bit raw via liveview

[Chris Barcellos]

Thanks Ted for information. Back to command prompts ? Arggg.... I thought I wouldn't see that again. I will have to take a look at the process .

I send an email to enquiring party about my latest adventures with the latest builds. I am appending that below. I got pink screen with both 30 th and 31st versions. Not sure what that means, but I got clean video using the 29th build thanks again for pointing me to the location.

My further notes:

The Magic Lantern Raw for 5D II and all other cams is still in development phase. I am currently working with nightly upgrades that create their own little quirks and issues. Eventually, they will get it working right.

I am using a "Komputerbay" 1000x 64 gb card I ordered from New Egg, as I recall. It ran around $ 100 USD. It was one that I had seen others indicate was working so I took a chance.

The widest I get with current set up is 1880 pix and a pix height of 840. Makes a nice 235:1 aspect ratio. They are adjusting more in the various versions, so I am sure there will be more changes. So yes, they are taking out of the center of the imaging chip, though there is not much left on the sides to get to 1920. There is a message that shows camera configuration cannot reach 1920 wide, which is the full frame.

The latest version I have worked with had capability of recording sound in a wave file form. It does eat up band width that makes it harder for the camera to record at the higher resolutions.

Most recent version also has continuous recording, through the 4 gigabyte range limitation. Hurray for that.

[Ted Ramasola]

Remember that beautiful Big Sur video shot with the BMCC?
Well here is another, this time shot by a 5DmkIII.

Bmcc

Meet Me in Big Sur on Vimeo

5DmkIII+ML Raw (pre alpha build may 22)

Big Sur RAWesome - Magic Lantern RAW 5D Mark III testing on Vimeo

I'll avoid making my personal comments and opinions as I have my own needs. I just wanted to share this as they have some sort of the same treatment for the same subject.

Lets not judge who did a better video since those are creative and thus subjective choices, I'm just amazed how both are capable tools. One is a new camera the other is running on hacked firmware and doing what its not supposed to be doing. ;)

[Noa Put]

The biggest difference I see with the 5d (with raw or without raw) is with the dr but mainly with the sharpness, there is much more very fine detail visible but I have not seen a 5d raw video yet that wows me like some bmc footage has done, like the one Andrew made.

The example video you showed looks much more plain compared to the bmc one. I see people comparing it to the bmc but I think, based on what I have seen so far, the bmc is still one step above, is it up to lack of knowledge, not knowing how to lift the footage to a higher level? I don't know, but even with the bmc I have seen a lot of crap looking footage as well so that might be the case.

But just the fact that you have the option to improve on the 5d's image quality to such extent is making the 5d a much more versatile camera. I was planning on getting a bmc pocket camera mainly for it's size and wide dr but since I have to invest in new glass as well I might as well cough up a bit more and get a 5dIII body as I do have a set of lenses for that, it will also fit right into my current paid projects workflow where the pocket camera would mainly be used for personal projects.

I only wonder if Canon will do something to prevent the ML firmware to be loaded by updating their own firmware or even make a change to their hardware? In the past the ML firmware was not much of a threat to their camera line up as it only did improve on functionality but the raw hack, when it will get stable, would be a threat to their much more expensive c line of camera's.

[Tim Polster]

This was my first thought when I read about the RAW efforts. Canon will probably sell more 5D's but this was clearly not in their gameplan. Once the cameras are in the wild, there is nothing they can do other than sue ML and get them to stop making their firmware addons.

[Nigel Barker]

Canon won't be suing Magic Lantern developers as reverse engineering is perfectly legitimate even when done commercially. I don't believe that Tamron & Sigma licence anything from Canon they just figured out how to get their lenses to talk to Canon bodies. ML has not infringed any Canon patent or copyright.

[Ted Ramasola]

As of yesterday, they have now made windows and osx converters with GUI to turn ML raw to Cinema DNGs compatible with resolve and speedgrade.

I have tested mkII footage and I was able to open it in resolve. They are ironing out technical quirks like, black levels, larger than 2gig files, etc. Amazing times. :)

[Jad Meouchy]

On the topic of Canon suing ML, I have some thoughts. Canon, from my conversations with various people in the company, is extremely supportive of their community. They added 24p because people asked for it. They added better codecs, dual slots, and reduced video moire in the mk3 because people asked for it. They added slowmotion because... you get the idea. I feel like they've done everything within their power to give us what we desire, short of releasing source code. The C100/300/500 exists because it is exactly what we wanted!

Sony is doing great things in the mid-range with their F3/5, and Blackmagic is making a strong play, but I have to give credit to Canon for paving the way and continuing to innovate. And of course for listening to all our seemingly bizarre feature requests like crop mode on the t3i ;)

[Mark Williams]

Just came across this...

Without You - Aware of Nature on Vimeo

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Jad Meouchy

On the topic of Canon suing ML, I have some thoughts. Canon, from my conversations with various people in the company, is extremely supportive of their community.

Canon does what any other major camera manufacturer does, they don't give us what we want, they cripple each model depending on it's price, the more ridiculous expensive it gets, the more you get what you asked for. Each (cheaper) model does have the features we all wanted but never got from Canon and which thx to the ML team have been provided to us, not by Canon.

[Evan Donn]

Originally Posted by Jad Meouchy

The C100/300/500 exists because it is exactly what we wanted

Except that the C100 has 4:2:0 24Mbit AVCHD while the C300 has 4:2:2 50Mbit MPEG2 - it wouldn't have cost them more to put the higher quality codec into the cheaper camera, even though everyone wanted it. It's done purely to create a greater marketing differentiation between the two. So while they may have designed these cameras to address what the market was asking for, they've also been careful to do so in a way that protects their higher margins. What ML is doing goes against that philosophy by enabling the lower-margin equipment to outperform Canon's more profitable stuff.

Now I don't think this necessarily means Canon will fight them, because I expect most of their higher-end market would be pretty reluctant to use an unauthorized hack on any professional job. But I also wouldn't expect them to promote or encourage what ML is doing for the same reason.

[Ted Ramasola]

As an update, I guess by now it is safe to clarify my original post which states "raw in liveview" since by now its clear that we have "raw video" coming out of, not only of the 5D, but also from a lot of the canon DSLRs including one that is not supposed to shoot any video, the 50D.

The 5D mkIII now has full HD resolution for Raw @ 1920 x 1080 24P, 25P and also 60P at 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 672, but since I don't have that camera I will let those who have it and tested the ML Raw to chime in and state the details.

For the 5DmkII, it is out of pre-alpha and now has ALPHA 1.
For those who are following the nightly builds, the June 12 compile by developer a.d. is the module version of ALPHA 1.
Link to jun 12 NB:
https://bitbucket.org/a_d_/magic-lan...ed3721fc44.zip

Alpha 1 is for those who are starting from scratch.
Link to ALPHA 1:
https://bitbucket.org/a_d_/magic-lan..._Alpha_One.zip

Alpha 1 PDF instructions:
https://bitbucket.org/a_d_/magic-lan..._Alpha_One.pdf

There is now jun 13 NB (able to save your settings implemented )
https://bitbucket.org/a_d_/magic-lan...3385aa13bd.zip

here are SOME of the 5D raw resolutions, aspect ratio and its status. (using a 1000x Lexar CF card)

1880x1058 -- 16:9 -- 400 frames approx.

1880x940 -- 2:1 -- 1,900-2,400 frames approx.

1880x854 -- 2.20:1 -- stable/continuous til card full

1728x972 -- 16:9 -- stable/continuous til card full

1728x864 -- 2:1 -- stable/continuous til card full


In 3x (5X magnify) crop mode ( note for now NB jun 12, centering and cropping in this mode is off a bit to the left)
crop mode will give optimum results when used with FPS over ride (23.976)

2152x1078 -- 2:1 -- 184 frames approx.

2048x1078 -- 1.90:1 -- 242 frames approx.

1920x1078 -- 16:9 -- 335 frames

1880x1058 --16:9 -- 430 frames approx.

1880x854 -- 2.20:1 -- stable/continuous

1728x972 -- 16:9 -- stable/continuous

There are more resolution and aspect ratio combinations.

For now the raw video in the 5D2 records beyond the 4gig limit by spanning several files.

Programmers have written several programs to extract the dngs, combine the spanned files and convert them to files understood by most systems.

Post processing:

Aside from DNGs you also can convert them to Cinema DNGs to make them compatible with Resolve.

RAWanizer by developer Marten has a windows interface to batch process your raw files to DNGs, Tiffs or proxy files in Prores, MP4, DNxHD, Csupport for Cineform.
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5557.0

Raw to Cinema DNG converter by developer Chmee for windows. I've tested this and the footage will open in both AE CS5 and Resolve.
http://www.phreekz.de/wordpress/2013...ng-cinema-dng/

RAWMagic by developer Thomas Worth converts raw to Cinema DNG works for Mac.
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=6218.0

So, is this ready for use in production? I'd say test it first and see if it works for you. If you already have a raw workflow and raw capable A camera, a BMC, red etc, I'd say you can use this as B cam for now.
Again, test it first if it works for you. If you're a DSLR shooter and want to use this in your project, test it and with a sound recorder, you might and could be succesfull in using this tool as it is now.

[Ted Ramasola]

Since I can't update/edit my previous post, I'll just add my test results on the recent builds jun 13 and 14.

I'd also like to correct my results on 1728 x 972 since i ran a couple of tests today and try to make long recordings to try and fill up the cf card. 32gig 1000x Lexar.

1880x1058 -- 16:9 -- 400 frames approx.

1880x940 -- 2:1 -- 1,900-2,400 frames approx.

1880x854 -- 2.20:1 -- stable/continuous til card full

1728x972 -- 16:9 -- 10,000 frames approx. ( 7min ) This is already near 32gig card capacity.

1728x864 -- 2:1 -- stable/continuous til card full

I was able to push 1728x972 to go that far by having GD=off / FPS override=23.976 / preview=Hacked mode. Otherwise it will be 7,150 - 6,550 ish.

I confirmed that 1880 x 854 is stable till it fills up card. In my tests it goes up to a 29.7 Gig (31,930,872,768 bytes) file on a 32 Gig card.

It takes me 15 minutes approx to transfer that from CF to Hard drive via usb 2.

Using RAWanizer to merge and extract to DNG it takes 34 min approx.

This is on my Quad core i7 64 bit win 7 system.

[Ted Ramasola]

Jun 16 Nightly build has much improved framing in the crop modes.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Evan Donn

What ML is doing goes against that philosophy by enabling the lower-margin equipment to outperform Canon's more profitable stuff.

The ML raw hack gives much better looking footage out of the 5D, but it's nowhere near as good as what I get out of my C100 (AVCHD and ProRes) on a daily basis.

[John Benton]

Ted
Thanks for the regular updates , much appreciated!
J