this magic lantern thingy

[tommo123]

anyone have experiences of it?

i'm curious as to what it offers (in practical terms) over stock? (i have a 550d/t2i). the wiki i found is a bit of a jumble to be honest.

is there any chance it'll add auto focus to the video?

 

[Griffinhart]

Magic Lantern Thingy?

 

[AkumaX]

anyone have experiences of it?

i'm curious as to what it offers (in practical terms) over stock? (i have a 550d/t2i). the wiki i found is a bit of a jumble to be honest.

is there any chance it'll add auto focus to the video?

no, but it does help in MF -some cool features such as:
- Focus Assist (red lines = in-focus) http://vimeo.com/18782586
- and Magic Zoom! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTupJcjQC-o&feature=player_embedded

 

[tommo123]

will have to check that out when at home tonight

ta 🙂

 

[Cattykit]

It offers so many crucial optiotns; it's a must.
Especially on 550D, it offers 2/3 stop ISO settings which enable you to get the best noise performance when shooting video.
Bitrate control is nice when you want to shoot longer than 12 min. by reducing the quality a bit.
Cropmark is quite useful when you're going for 2.35 ratio.
On-screen audio meter and audio control is superb. Makes a night and day difference.

Magic Lantern 0.2.0 for 550D firmware 1.0.9:

• GUI menus: press the ERASE button to display them, SET/DISP to change values
• Bit rate control (QScale parameter) for the H.264 encoder
• Zebra stripes for overexposed / underexposed areas
• Spotmeter, histogram
• Cropmarks (16:9, Cinemascope, Fisheye)
• Intervalometer (classic or HDR)
• Trap Focus: camera takes a picture when something comes in focus
• Remote release with either the LCD face sensor or audio trigger
• Rack focus
• Stack focus (Live View only)
• Lens data computation
• Onscreen audio meters
• Manual audio gain, selectable input source, disable AGC and digital filters
• Display time remaining during video recording
• Debug functions (display CMOS temperature, screenshot, logging)
• Fine tuning for ISO and shutter speeds; also ISO 25600
• Kelvin white balance
• Clean LiveView display without any overlays (selectable)
• On-demand auto tuning for ISO, shutter & kelvin white balance
• Quick access to some useful settings like HTP, ALO and contras

 

[tommo123]

hmm, wonder why the 12 min limit anyway?

ta for the info catty 🙂

 

[AkumaX]

hmm, wonder why the 12 min limit anyway?

ta for the info catty 🙂

current file system on the card limits recording to 4gb per file (even on 16/32gb cards). it just so happens that @ 48000kit/sec, it's roughly equivalent to 12 min. so if you lower the bitrate to, say 24000kb/sec, you can get 24 min! (not sure what bitrates ML will let you set 😛)

 

[Kaido]

current file system on the card limits recording to 4gb per file (even on 16/32gb cards). it just so happens that @ 48000kit/sec, it's roughly equivalent to 12 min. so if you lower the bitrate to, say 24000kb/sec, you can get 24 min! (not sure what bitrates ML will let you set 😛)

So why can a digital camcorder record hours and hours of footage on an SD card then?

I'd assume it's subject to the FAT formatting as well, but wraps the movie into a container - and the dSLR's can't do that? I know you can take stills with digital camcorders as wel, so obviously the structure system allows for both stills and motion video files.

 

[tommo123]

hmm, file system makes sense - until you realise that they should use a different file system

any reason they can't use ntfs on there?

or even just carry on recording on a 2nd file? wonder what they are actually able to do with a firmware mod

 

[AkumaX]

So why can a digital camcorder record hours and hours of footage on an SD card then?

I'd assume it's subject to the FAT formatting as well, but wraps the movie into a container - and the dSLR's can't do that? I know you can take stills with digital camcorders as wel, so obviously the structure system allows for both stills and motion video files.

hours, as in 12min x 20 pieces, lol. 😉 but really, its just the file system. FAT32 can't do > 4gb, at all.
digital cameras that can record hours on a SD card? different file system, or lower bitrate (my old HD camcorder recorded stuff @ 6000kbps = 1.5 hours for 4gb)

 

[Cattykit]

Panasonic and Sony HD-Dslrs use AVCHD form of h.264 codec. The downside is that it's restrained by AVCHD specification (not always the case though as seen in recent Sony compact cameras that offer 1080p60 in 28mbps bitrate.)
The upside is that it supports continuous recording by automatically generating a new file when 4GB limit is reached.
However, Sony cameras(A55, NEX) cannot take advantage of it due to the heating problem that's, in fact, the worst out of current HD-DSLRs. Thus, it's only a Panasonic camera (I only know about GH2) that can truly records hours of video nonstop without a heating problem.

The moral of the story is that even if all the cameras do support hours of continous recording, it's pretty much useless at this point for there exists a heating problem (beside GH2 of course.)