Oscar M.

Oh yeah. Let's give ML 2-3 months and 5D3 is going to be a BEAST!

Totally agree.

Let's get one thing straight though, this is huge, this is amazing and the difference in quality is just unbelievable, and the way it's been going, I wouldn't be surprised if they sort out the 40 seconds limitation within the hour, but yeah, 40 seconds is a MASSIVE limitation for any kind of narrative, fiction or documentary, and anyone who claims otherwise can't know what they're talking about. You can find a million films without a single 40 second long shot, but probably none of those shots comes from takes shorter than a few minutes.

Tell an actor they have 40 seconds to get it right and good luck getting a good performance out of them...

I'm very excited at the possibilities this hack currently presents, I wouldn't be excited about using it as it stands.

Some things haven't been answered yet either, I keep hearing that the camera is also doing less work since the raw feed is always happening anyway, but CF recording alone is enough to heat up the camera, and some people did say the camera heats up much more than usual when recording raw video, would anyone care to compare?

Also, what about compressing that raw video to h264 in camera with decent h264 transcoding? Transcoding those raw files to h264 gives us much better results than the camera's own h264, so maybe they could override that and give us higher quality smaller files and longer recording times?

Obviously Prores would be awesome, but that would probably not be possible, whereas with h264, perhaps the camera already has some sort of hardware optimization.

Most of the footage I've seen also appears to stutter every now and then. Are we getting a steady 24fps or is it not accurate yet?

For the Music video shooters it might be just enough.

Is there any chance to see 30fps footage test? At any res...

You'll probably have to wait for CF speeds to increase.

I'm still stunned that it's taken so long for people to understand the benefits of raw for video. Especially people who were calling for 4K, before raw.

 

But you are probably right, I think that raw will be standard on the >$3K prosumer models that come out in the years to come.

 

I pretty sure this whole 5d raw hack was green-lighted by Canon.  Japanese companies love is survey data, and I'm sure it's been telling them that Black Magic was about to eat their lunch.

There's definitely more value in RAW than in 4K. Especially for post processing, I have had dreams about having the same flexibility that a stills photographer have with their workflows.

When you think about, film very much afforded the same flexibility and value for both  photography and video, but things are very different with digital.

Unless Canon comes out and blasts ML for the latest hack, I will be inclined to think that at the very least they were enablers and allowed the firmware to be hackable.

Not sure what you mean by this. It already is an industry standard for semi to big budget. As far as pro-sumer/hobbyist I think the goal will be to have options and efficiency. No way that compressed video is going away for that market anytime soon.

I should clarify.

RAW Video support for video should be as common as 1080p video is across most cameras today. The fact that ML has had to painstakingly figure out on their own how to bypass the limitations imposed by Canon tells a lot about the state of RAW video support in most Cameras today. If you're not a Philip Bloom, you cannot afford to shoot RAW. I believe ML changes all that, but not only that, any manufacturer not incorporating some kind of RAW option in their new Camera models might as well throw in the towel.

For god's sake, why can't people just be positive.

 

If your free raw on a DSLR is so much of a hassle or too soft don't shoot with it. Spend $15,000 on a C300 instead, but first ask yourself how many 128GB CF cards you can buy for $15,000.

 

When you are shooting a live event you will be swapping cards every 20 minutes and breaking the flow, not practical. Don't shoot with it.

 

For when you are working on the performances, the lighting, the set, or shooting in fits and bursts documentary style the small 128GB card is not an issue. By the time you have shot 20 mins of footage, you will probably have spent an hour doing off camera stuff or shot selection or composition and the million other things that happen to get a good shot sequence together. Changing the card every 2 hours doesn't seem like a chore to me. Then after that the raw is whatever you want it to be. ProRes transcode... Done. Nobody should be archiving uncompressed raw, it doesn't make sense not to compress it in some form.

 

Raw is only big on the CF card, it doesn't have to be as big on your drive. You're shooting raw - that means you choose your codec.

 

In my view of it, the 5D Mark 3 IS shooting ProRes. It's raw! You capture the data and send it to ProRes land. View it like that and tell me why drive space is still such a big issue.

 

Best of all, raw gives you the ability to leave picture profiles and other camera settings like ISO alone and SHOOT. Wrong WB on H.264 and you are screwed. Wrong WB on raw - well there's no such thing as wrong WB with raw unless you blindly fuck it up in post and even then you have a much larger ability to fix a dodgy exposure or other problems which would have been baked into H.264.

 

H.264, be it on the FS100, GH3, GH2, whatever - is not going anywhere near my serious projects from now on. Raw all the way.

Fully agreed.

As I said on a different post:  Expect RAW to be an industry standard by this time next year.

I'm sure you know we are discussing two different lenses feeding two very different size sensors. As a result, the focal plane position and depth of field for the two shots will not be comparable directly. The BMCC will have a much greater DoF and so even if the focal plane is at the same point in the image (I don't see that we've been given confirmation of that, typically these unscientific tests are completely unreproducible because the testers are too lazy to tell us exactly what was done in them) as we move away from that plane in either direction the smaller sensor will retain smaller circles of confusion optically at the sensor. This optical advantage can easily make up for significant disadvantages of the sensor and later processing (visible in the BMCC's false color artifacts on the pebbles for instance, which you had to butcher to tame).

 

Which is why the first comparisons to be made should be test charts (properly focused of course, with lenses of similar scientifically validated performance even if not identical due to mount/sensor size differences). Why we can't get 100% reproducible test chart data first of all I have no explanation to provide you. We can still argue somewhat objectively with this anecdata but we have to be very careful in understanding everything we may be seeing before declaring something "proven."

Agreed.

Zacuto should include the 5D3 running ML in RAW on their next shoot out . . . that will be really interesting. Everything else is NOISE.

Lots of people outside the US were smart enough to say "no" to GMO foods and all kinds of other stuff sold to Americans as good and necessary and useful.  American consumers are wholly ignorant beasts, by and large.  I credit the internet (along with financially hard times) for GM and Ford's move in just the last couple years to start selling cars to Americans that are near as good as what they've been selling to Europeans for more than a decade.

I'm guessing you have bigger issues than "RAW" and "4K".

Wait, what?

They are now.  . . . or will, sorry . . . . LOL

LOL, they "forsee".

 

They were sold.  Please.  They were convinced that audiences were going to come to expect to see that stupid logo, even though they were rarely going to see a film actually finished at 4K.  It's sales, nothing more.

And yet, most cameras are now shooting 4K. Just wondering, why are you fighting progress so much man? If I didn't know any better I'd asume you would rather send the industry back to film.

  
This is not true, and even if it were, almost none of the content being screened is 4K. Even Skyfall, which Sony used to push 4K projection, was sourced from a 2K master.
And 1080p TVs are hugely more widespread, but that doesn't change the fact that all TV broadcasts are 720p.

I didn't say most of the content is 4K, I said the "Hardware" is 4K. To put it simply, if the movie theater in your area has shown a 3-D feature, then most likely it has a 4K projector. They foresee 4K standardization soon.

I haven't seen anyone answer if the camera requires a cool down.

Coverage is everything. You might not have concerns, but your editor might.

The answer is NO.

Because of the way ML's module work, the Digic processor is actually doing less work by writing RAW than it does by writing H.264.

H.264 requires a lot of downsampling, up-sampling and compressing. RAW is a "straight file save from sensor to card" no processing in between. Therefore, expect the camera to actually consume less power when shooting RAW with no overheating issues! 

Well then, smart guy, remind me when the breakthru in human evolution occurred that, not in a millennia, not in a century and not even in a generation but within the span of a product cycle uplifted the resolving power of our eyes so that the resolution in a 4K display of average television size isn't completely wasted as a result of physics and biomechanics.

 

PS> they had HD in the labs since the 1950s, before we went to the moon, before a majority of TV owners were "enjoying" color sets.  Technology improved in all that time but our eyes are the same.

Basically, 1080p on screens larger than 50" is not ideal hence the need for higher resolution screens. A larger screen demands more pixels to display content without degradation. 4K will look amazing on small screens but in 1080 the larger the screen the worse the content looks.

A case in point: Most - if not all - Movie theaters use 4K projectors and while consumers are not going to have anything that size displayed in their homes, consumer screens continue to increase in size and the prices continue to drop. 

I think Apple's next major device is going to be a 4K TV.

4k TVs everywhere and broadcasters reacting accordingly? Broadcasts aren't even in 1080p yet.

Where have you been? . . . 4K Tvs and projectors are already out there!

I don't see how it could be viewed as a blackmagic killer. For 500/1000 more you are getting a 2k/4k raw and Prores camera. The DR should be about the same and global shutter. With the difference in cost of media, they should be very close in price and the camera is truly meant to shoot continuous video. Now if you really own a 5d3 or really want the full frame look or better low light, then it becomes a very attractive camera compared to the Blackmagic cinema cameras. Now if ML can make the raw work on the lower end camera in the $ 1000 range then it changes everything.

That is not an "IF" but a "WHEN" . . .  just head over to the ML forums and you'll find out that they already have it working on the 6D and 650D, 5D2 coming and many others.

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5247.0

Unless the ML team figure out how to write to a Ninja or Hyperdeck shuttle down the HDMI or implement file spanning to break free of the 4GB file limit this development although amazing is going to have little practical use with takes restricted to about 40 seconds (4MBx24/25fps=100MB/sec)

What you do not know is that this has been in the works for months. ML already has working compiles of the software that allows them to write to exFAT formatted cards. Many users have already implemented it.

Breaking the 4GB limit is fairly easy. The hard part was RAW. Now, it turns out that RAW may, in fact, be better for the camera than H.264 because incredibly, Digic uses less power to write RAW than it does to write H.264 - and it's all done without overheating the camera!

This is a testament to the fact that these cameras were meant to be "RAW war machines" and it implies that h.264 was basically the product of Canon's market segmentation strategy - Low-end users, ProSumer users and High-end users - different price points for different users. 

All-in-all, this is bound to change everything. Expect, by this time next year that RAW will be the film standard in the industry. And get this, I'm going to go even further and predict that this will also greatly impact the TV manufacturing industry. With 4K becoming standard, you can bet that TV manufacturers and broadcasters will follow suit in order to accomodate the new, better content- expect 4K TVs to start popping up everywhere . . .

Let's wait and see.

My camera gets warm and the CF card is warm too.  Getting me worried since this is my main camera for stills.  I haven't had it get warm before when recording H.264 files.  I'm trying it out but I'm always checking to make sure it doesn't melt down on me...

What card are you using? You got to use the fastest CF card you can afford . . . 1000x at this point.

I can't quite wrap my head around the workflow. Is it spitting out a bunch of still frames, or is it a video file of some sort? 

It writes to a single large raw file. You then have to use raw2png.exe to extract the individual frame stills. Then, you can process the stills in Lightroom or Photoshop and then import in After Effects to render a video file like ProRes 422.

Without being too greedy.... has there been any further talk on variable framerates (both faster and slower)?

Because of the way ML has re-structured their code, There is no question that they are going to be pushing the FPS beyond 60fps. Look, if the 5D3 is able to do RAW at 3K, I would not be surprised if H.264 1080p@120fps is possible. The camera has already shown that it can handle huge loads.

A good business strategy would be to develop high end technology Cripple it for the high end then cripple it even more and sell to the low end. When the high end are finished buying decripple the lower end so it sells by the bucket load then come out with a new range for the higher end that is even better and cripple it for the low end. When your technology runs out of steam You keep your pro and consumer market ticking over with incremental improvements.

 

Maybe five years ago they could make a £500 camera that could shoot raw on cards they could already build but crippled them.

 

Maybe the camera market has maximised profit and we have been led like sheep.

 

Maybe Magic Lantern and Vitaliy are proving this with their work.

I couldn't have said it better!

This looks amazing! Does anyone know how audio is handled when shooting in this format? (if at all)

Don't expect audio. You'll have to go back to your good 'ol external recorder.

I actually think that Canon's profit margins would be better with the dslrs - the user base is larger, the upgrade cycle is faster. They still do very well by having both but the DSLR is their bread and butter.

As far as how people are going to cope with storage:

Don't forget about a little equation called Moore's law. I guarantee you that if there is enough demand for cheaper larger drives, they will come sooner rather than later. 

So they priced an 8 bit camera out of the budget range of most ghetto-budget filmmakers (like us) and didn't include raw in its feature set, but then gave raw away in an 'affordable' $3.5K model? Got it.

 

The thing people need to bare in mind is how expensive raw is if you want to shoot with it for a serious project. Anyone who opts for a 600D over a Mk III probably can't afford to shoot raw.

I think that the BMCC had a lot to do with what canon has done recently. You have to believe that the BMCC priced at 3K had Canon worried and definitly posed a major threat to their bottom line. Sure, Canon will do well just selling to the still photographers, but it has done much better selling the low budget filmmaker. It would be a loss to lose all these people to BMD.

OTH, Yes. I could be wrong and Canon is just totally oblivious to the needs of a large section of their customers.