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Canon DSLR Hack Allows It To Shoot RAW Video
When the Canon 50D DSLR camera was released back in 2008, it could take nice pictures, but it had no support for video recording. Now, through an enterprising hack by members of the Magic Lantern forums, the 50D can capture RAW video. From the article:
"The tech inside the 50D looks like it borrows a lot more from its higher-end siblings, like the 5D Mark II, and it’s possible we may actually get better RAW video quality out of the 50D than we do out of any of the non-CF Canon cameras. ... The camera doesn’t have playback or audio recording as it was never designed to shoot video, but this isn’t too different from the RAW recording on the other Canon DSLRs at the moment."
Now that is a kickass hack! Seriously, taking hardware with limited functionality and actually adding (not just restoring) functionality to it that was not planned for it is pretty cool.
This is not like the "triple core" or "double core" CPUs being "hacked" into quad-cores when the crippling was just the setting low of a line or setting of a jumper on the chip. That was back when they were making all the chips quad cores and then crippling them as needed to meet market need: more dual cores were being purchased because of the lower price point, so the manufacturer just intentionally "disavowed" the extra cores on those chips, just to make a sale at that price point.
Of course, due to some hardware limitations, it can just record bursts of 59 frames at a time (probably RAM buffer limits since the RAW video takes up hella lot of data):
DNG Burst and raw videoThe 50d can already shoot DNG silent bursts with maximum resolutions of 1592x1062 (buffer is full at 59 frames) in 1x mode and 1992x1080 (buffer is full at 53 frames) in crop mode thanks to @smeangol http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5481.msg37526#msg37526
@coutts has found the stubs for the 40d which means it is 'likely' that the 40d can do raw video and DNG bursts however it will need porting and developing.
@Smeangol is having some success in porting the raw recording feature however some other developer assistance may be required to iron out bugs.
No, not really. This is a camera, designed for stills. It has the capacity to capture video (unlocked by this hack) but no ability to capture audio, or playback the video, meaning it's not really a functional video camera. That is, while it has the technical capacity to capture video, it has none of the supporting features that make the ability to capture video useful.
It's like plugging your headphones into your microphone jack and talking through them. Yeah, they have the technical capability to record sound, but the rest of the device isn't designed to make that capability useful.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Most device manufacturers do not have a lot of budget on their firmware development, so, what they do is to have a generic-enough firmware developed, then they add and/or delete a couple of options, depending on the price point of their device model, package it as the firmware for that particular model
Back in the olden days when we were using USRobotic dial up modems we used to buy 2400 baud modem and then re-flash them to run at 4800 or even 9600 baud
The magic lantern community has been around for a long time, and I am surprised that Slashdot does not know about them, until now
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Not to mention the capacity issues... These cameras are eating up something like 500-600 megabits per second at full resolution, and the ones people are most excited about doing this on (like the 5DIII) cost as much or more than video cameras that are designed to record to high bit-depth compressed format like ProRes 4444 (which is 12-bit).
I guess there's some value in getting more out of your existing gear...
Feel free to create and manufacture your own camera with free software. Nothing is stopping you.
Monstar L
This is about the stupidest thing I have ever read. Exactly how is it unethical to sell me a product that I want, that does exactly what I want it to do for a price I am happy to pay, unethical?
If it were advertised to do more but didn't, that would be unethical.
The difference is that recording audio through your headphones gets you crappy audio that technically works and is a pain in the rear to capture. With a hack like this you get really great video quality (and audio is something you're ideally recording with separate equipment anyway), but it's a pain in the rear to capture. In the headphones-as-microphone case the only real motivation is desperation, but in this case you actually have a really great end product to show for it, and you can get it out of relatively very cheap gear. So if you don't have a lot of money and you really need video at that quality, then working around the restrictions of a hacked DSLR may very well be worth it, and can open up possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be accessible to you.
While some of the Nikkors are undeniably better than the Canon equivalents, or don't even have Canon equivalents - like the 14-24mm, the 50mm f/1.4 isn't generally one you'd go out of your way to use via one of the readily available adapters that let you mount Nikkors on Canon bodies. More likely that they just wanted a small lens for the picture so they could show off the fact it was a 50D rather than flaunt the attached lens, and the Nikkor+adapter combination was the best option available.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Canon's actually pretty cool about the use of custom firmware. Plus projects like CHDK and Magic Lantern (and the thing that hacked the 300D into something fancier) have been around for quite a few years, and Canon hasn't tried squashing them.
(Although apparently their hacker-friendly nature most definitely stops when it comes to the EOS-1 line.)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
It can be unethical when the manufacturer or a group of manufacturer makes sure that the products you can buy are only available with certain limitations and at a fixed price. You would still want "that product", it would do "exactly what you want because you do no know better" and at a price you are "happy to pay" since you need it and there is no alternative. The benefit for the monopolist or the oligopolist is that they can maximise the cash they remove from your pocket, and make sure it's very hard for disruptive technologies to enter the market. in the ex: DDR many people where very happy to buy a "Trabant" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Trabi_Go to get an idea of the attachment people had for their car, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant to have an idea of what you could get after 5 to 25 waiting time and a large part of your "extra cash"... So it's not because you are too dumb to understand that you've been conned that it's not an unethical con. And of course "non free software" is a "cheap" way to make sure that your hardware is controlled by the seller and not you, whether it's a computer, a phone, a tablet, a camera, or even a car... (non free software in the car systems enables the manufacturer to force you to use the garage they choose (by forcing them to buy their diagnostic tools and only authorize them to use their spare parts at their prices)
Are you sure this is the official point of view of the Eastern Orthodox Church ? or does it has something to do with Epithelial Ovarian Cancer ?
Old, manual-focus, non-zoom lens are in many ways better than modern lenses for filming, and cheaper and lighter than modern equivilents.
* Good manual focus rings, you dont usually want AF for film (technically because not many DSLRs can do autofocus in video, and also because autofocus does not always do what you want it to do in video, eg rack between to faces as they talk). AF lens tend to be poor for manual focus, the whole focus range may only take a small rotation, so it is hard to be preciese.
* Large aperture. there are plenty of old F/1.8 and F/1.4 around. You dont have so much freedom with shutterspeed as you do with stills.
* No zoom. Not commonly used in film. You wont find an F/1.8 zoom easily
* Not as sharp as a modern lens. But this does not matter, HD is only 2 megapixels where as modern lens need to be sharp at 20 megapixels
You can't put an old canon lens on a new canon camera (without an adaptor containing an extra lens element). Old nikkon lens only require a cheap ($20) adaptor to fit a modern canon.
"It can be unethical when" is a qualification that was not applied to the AC's original statement. Quite often it's banded around like it's an axiom or a matter of orthodoxy.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
EOC - Eventually On Canon?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Most of these are probably sitting in closets or got recycled by now.
This isn't a disposable point and shoot, it's a $1400 dSLR discontinued less than 3 years ago, with a still competitive specification. I'd hazard a guess that most of them are still in active use. Also, from the article "The tech inside the 50D looks like it borrows a lot more from its higher-end siblings, like the 5D Mark II, and it's possible we may actually get better RAW video quality out of the 50D than we do out of any of the non-CF Canon cameras." ('non-CF' cameras would include the current 60D model and below).
No, they are not. There are many reasons this was not enabled on the original camera, but let's take a look at some of them.
This is not today usable to anyone but the most hard-core video enthusiasts. Think about it. This is raw video. The recommended cards to use are 1000x cards (which were not available at the time and quite expensive today). You should have 64G cards or bigger in order to put more than a couple of minutes worth of video on the card. Then you need to post-process what is basically a bunch of images. After Effects is not something the average user has. Also, the camera doesn't have microphone input, so there is no way you can get audio in the video from the camera. Etc, and so forth.
This is for movie makers who are happy bringing dozens of CF cards at $300 a pop on a shoot. Most people doesn't spend $3000 on a camera, let alone 10 compact flash cars so they can shoot for an hour.
Actually the sensors used in Canon and Nikon cameras are manufactured by Canon and Nikon on Canon and Nikon Lithographic processes, and are used exclusively in Canon and Nikon cameras. You can't buy the sensors for use in your own camera and what is available commercially is substantially inferior to those produced by Canon and Nikon (and Sony).
In fact there are cameras with free software firmware, including digital cinema cameras similar to what this hack does, however the quality of the sensors used in them is inferior, resulting in an inferior camera. Also Canon and Nikon DSLRs have extremely good opto-mechanical assemblies, which would be hard to match.
Nikon is a leader in precision engineering, they built one of the first ruling engines which is a pretty critical piece of precision machinery for bootstrapping photolithography as it is used to produce linear diffraction gratings which is critical to all photolithographic processes, additionally Canon and Nikon are two of the very few (I can also think of Minolta, Carl Zeiss, ASML and Applied Materials) companies worldwide that produce steppers which are used for patterning semiconductor wafers. The precision construction of lens and mirrors is the dominant limiting factor in geometry reductions in photolithography, so it follows that companies with a long history of making quality optical components and devices are also leaders in the field of photolithography. As I'm sure you are aware, this type of equipment and processing is extremely expensive (billions of dollars).
So nothing is stopping you, except billions of dollars of capital you don't have.
So most of the Hollywood high end cameras are also non functional? Because a panavision camera cant record audio. That is why they do the clapper thing and have an audio recording setup.
IT makes it unusable to consumers that want to film their kitteh. But then shooting RAW video is useless to 99% of the people that have video cameras.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So nothing is stopping you, except billions of dollars of capital you don't have.
And this is where the idea of intellectual property makes sense. If someone invested billions in creating something, he's entitled to profit from that.
It's not like those billions were lying around. People worked to save money and invested it in shares of those companies, that's where the billions came from.
It can be unethical when the manufacturer or a group of manufacturer makes sure that the products you can buy are only available with certain limitations and at a fixed price.
Conversely, even though the hardware may be capable of doing many things with the right software, those software features cost money to create. So the vendor has a choice:
1. Give everyone those software features, raise the price for everyone to cover the cost of creating them.
2. Give those software features only to the people willing to pay for them, therefore keeping the price down for the people who aren't.
(2) seems like a better option for everyone - the consumers who aren't interested in paying for a feature get to keep the cheap price they desire; the consumers who are interested in paying for a feature gets that feature; the vendor recoups the cost of (and profits from) development of that feature.
The slashdot crowd seem to think that just because software distribution is essentially free, software creation is too.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
You won't be shooting much video on it, it's an unofficial hack and has a lot of problems.
But in certain areas, this is useful. Think astrophotography, where it's common to "video" the telescope image (with suitable equatorial mount) to form image stacks that can then be processed to form a single, high-quality, composite image. You can get photos of Saturn's rings, say, that are at magnifications impossible to see in the telescope itself or to get a steady shot of through the atmosphere.
Sure, you could just "take lots of images", but when building such an image stack, a video (especially a raw video without MPEG artefacts) gives a more easier-to-process stack and hundreds of times more images to work with to get a better final composite.
And astrophotography is exactly the kind of area that will tear apart the camera to get good images (e.g. removing IR filters, etc.)
To me, RMS is by and large a nutcase.
Some may argue that, but he's still the guy responsible for kicking off free software as a phenomenon.
It's open to question whether Linux would have been released under something like the GPL if Stallman hadn't created that in the first place. Bear in mind that it was originally distributed under its own license, which restricted commercial usage.
He wonders why Hurd will probably never make it
Does he, or are you putting words in his mouth?
My understanding is that Stallman is generally positive about the Linux kernel itself (even if he dislikes the use of "Linux" to refer to the whole OS and lack of acknowledgement given to the GNU components), and considers it to fulfil the need for a Free kernel that the Hurd was originally intended to meet.
and why people just call Linux by the name of the kernel rather than his insisted GNU/Linux
Possibly because it's shorter, or because they're lazy. Whatever the reason, I doubt it's got much to do with them being ideologically opposed to Stallman.
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