Canon 5d mark III

A few days ago the Magic Lantern team announced the breakthrough of RAW video capture using the Canon 5d Mark III. The first announcement only offered the ability to record about 60 frames in DNG format. Although interesting, 2 seconds of shooting time isn’t very practical. A day later they announced a workaround that would allow data to bypass all of the processing and encoding which allows for much longer files. This allows the information to be written to the CF card in a .raw file which would be processed into DNG or Mjpeg on a computer in post. This new method requires a CF card with very high write speeds (80MB/s or above) and a lot of storage space (128GB will give you about 15 minutes).

I’ve been watching this unfold for a few days now and I must say that this is very interesting. The hack is still very early in it’s development and it seems there are still a lot of things to sort out.

So far it appears that audio isn’t captured during the process which is unfortunate but understandable. Also the workflow looks to be a bit on the complex side of things. The question I have is, will there be overheating issues? The sensor isn’t being abused by this hack (as far as I can tell). This is because the sensor is still streaming the exact same data to the buss as it did when the camera wasn’t hacked so that shouldn’t be a huge issue. But the data being streamed to the CF card slot is pretty demanding and i’m wondering how much heat will be generated by the components involved in writing data to the CF card.

As of right now I’m not brave enough to start testing my cameras, but I have started ordering a few 1000x 128GB CF cards in preparation for future testing. With something like this it’s best to wait a few weeks to see how things pan out.

If you feel like you just can’t wait here’s a pretty good guide on how to install, set everything up, and handle the work flow. Also be sure to donate to the guys at Magic Lantern for bring such amazing new features to market.

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