Canon DSLR Hack Allows It To Shoot RAW Video 171
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."
Re:im confused here (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:im confused here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:im confused here (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Now that is a kickass hack! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I beg to differ. That is precisely what this hack resembles. Quoth the article:
The tech inside the 50D looks like it borrows a lot more from its higher-end siblings....
Translated, that means the camera already has the hardware required for the task; it simply lacked the firmware/software to implement it. The camera wasn't "crippled" per se, but the "extra core" was already there waiting to be utilized.
Re:Now that is a kickass hack! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, indeed you are correct. The hardware was there, but my opinion or reading of it is that it was not "crippled" but never intended to have this functionality. It does not have enough RAM to buffer frames continuously at uncompressed DNG format rates for continuous video recording to SD card, whereas other cameras that were designed specifically for video recording have enough memory to be capable of doing this.
Thus my interpretation is that this camera model's hardware specs were deemed insufficient by the manufacturer for this specific capability, and considering that it can only do burst mode up to $X$ frames before capping out its memory buffer, the manufacturer may have been correct. So my interpretation is not that they "re-enabled a purposely disabled core" but rather that they added functionality which the manufacturer had decided that this hardware was not capable of performing well.
Re:Now that is a kickass hack! (Score:4, Insightful)
The buffer is important, but it's more about being able to stream a metric shitload of data to a unwholesomely speedy memory card - once you can do the latter, the buffer helps smooth over hiccups but won't let you record indefinitely. The 50D's CompactFlash interface probably shares a design with a higher-end camera, Canon not wanting to waste effort in building a second, deliberately crippled version.
Being able to record RAW video is a pretty new feature on any vaguely consumer-oriented camera [wikipedia.org] - it's more sheer luck that Canon's dSLRs have features which make it possible, albeit in a hacky manner. I get the impression that on the 50D, it's grabbing data from the sensor in a manner intended for the rear display or for feeding into the (non-existent) H.264 encoder, and then streaming it out to a big file on the memory card before the memory runs out.
When you've captured the data, it's in a big, opaque file that needs post-processing on a PC to do anything with it - in this case, it gets split into sane DNG files for further processing in software like Lightroom or similar. You can record the video on the camera, but you can't (unless I'm horribly mistaken) play the video on the camera - you need to do plenty of subsequent processing to get it into video form.
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly cool hack - partly because it gives access to a feature which few high-end cameras have even today. It's not the manufacturer deliberately locking users out of an easily-implemented feature, it's the manufacturer not even realising that such a feature was possible - albeit in a restricted, but still usable, form.
Re:im confused here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:im confused here (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Now that is a kickass hack! (Score:3, Insightful)
Translated, that means the camera already has the hardware required for the task
No, it doesn't. The video captured with a hacked 50D is not usable as is. You can't even watch it on a computer. Also, back then, it would not have been possible to make this hack work since there were no memory cards that would be able to store more than a few seconds (just over two in fact, at 24fps) of video. What do you think Canon customers would have said if the Canon 50D commercial had said:
Buy the 50D and make video with your DSLR. You can record almost three seconds of video before it stops for a while writing to the CF card. You will be able to record up to 3-5 minutes of video in two second burts to your memory card, so bring a lot of memory cards to the wedding. Oh, and btw, the video can not be watched on the camera nor on any TV or computer known to man. After having shot the video you will need to import the video to your computer, then import it into Adobe After Effects (part of the Adobe CS2 package at $2000 or so) for color grading (which is required) and rendering to video. Your two second bursts are sure to be a winner at the after-wedding party if the party is set about a week or so after the wedding.
The camera wasn't crippled at all. It was built very well, but some of the components can today be used differently when upgrading the software. Providing you have hardware plugged into the camera that is available today but that was not available when the camera was released. Oh, and remember, the camera doesn't actually shoot video, it stores a sequence of images that you can import to a powerful computer equipped with specialized software to make a movie from. None of what you have seen was captured by the camera alone.
Re:im confused here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.