Digital Video Camera Accessories

Yes, the source for the still above is a 1080p 14bit RAW shot with the 5D mark III!!! Here’s a test video showing you how that looks in motion with an article elaborating the work with the camera: LINK. If you haven’t seen it you should check it out.

Yesterday the developers working on the Magic Lantern hack for the Canon 5D mark III posted about their progress on a RAW hack that enables the Canon 5D mark III to shoot continuous 14bit RAW at 24 frames per second (!!!). We tested it and it works, and the results are totally breathtaking and revolutionary (videos and review to follow later today). Here’s how you can do it too!

If you’re not a computer scientist it’s not easy to get the Magic Lantern hack and 14bit RAW module working that was posted in the Magic Lantern forums yesterday. There are no guides around and it’s still in its early Alpha stage.
After struggling for a day we managed to pull it off so here’s our complete dummies guide to squeeze the RAW bits out of a 5D mark III.

NOTE: Here’s what WE did and what worked for us. There’s no guarantee this will work for you, in fact you will void your warranty for the camera and it might be dead afterwards. Note that we take no responsibility for what happens when you follow our guide. Do it at your own risk and research on your own if you want to make sure.

Getting the firmware and RAW module onto the camera:

1. Get a 5D mark III with a fully charged battery. If you buy a mark III, please get it
___HERE. We did this on a Mac with a Transcend card reader, a 16GB SD card and one of
___the fast Komputerbay CF cards (fast read/write required. You get 15 minutes of 1080p
___on a 128GB card).
Note that there’ve been numerous people who didn’t achieve the same resolution with their 128GB Komputerbay CF cards. Maybe there are inconsistencies in different Komputerbay batches. Apparently the Komputerbay 64GB are consistently faster to achieve the 1080p at 25fps. Europeans can get the cards here: LINK
2. Downgrade the Canon 5D mark III firmware from 1.2.1 (latest) to the compatible
___1.1.3. Firmware Links:
___OSX: LINK (thanks to user Kobus)
___WIN: LINK
3. Format the SD card (up to 16GB) in camera. Make sure the dial is always on “M” (manual mode)
4. Get the whole Magic Lantern package (link updated May 16th: Latest working version
___seems to be from May 13th) (File –> Download) (posted by aaphotog in the
___Magic Lantern forum)
4B. (updated on May 17th) To get 25p with a 1/50th shutter use this package: LINK
5. From the Magic Lantern package copy the 5D3-113-bootflag.fir file to the root folder
___of the SD card.
6. Place the SD card in your camera, switch it on and go to the firmware update in the
___camera menu. Do the update which will “turn” your camera’s bootflag. Whatever that
___means.
7. The camera now loads weird overlays, wait until it’s finished. Switch the camera off.
8. Get the SD card back in the Computer. DELETE 5D3-113-bootflag.fir file from the SD!
9. Copy the autoexec.bin and “ML” folder from the updated package onto the SD
___card.
10. Download Macboot and the Mountain Lion fix (if you’re on a Mountain Lion Machine)
___(for Windows see here: http://wiki.magiclantern.fm/install).
11. Open only the “.command” file (for Mountain Lion) and insert your password in the
___Terminal window that pops up.
12. The Macboot app should open. Select “DSLR Bootable” and press “prepare card”.
___It should now display a “success” note.
13. Click “Eject Card”.
14. The SD card goes back into the 5D mark III together with the Komputerbay CF card.
15. Switch camera on.
16. Now press the “trash button” on the camera to activate Magic Lantern. The Magic
___Lantern menu should load.
16B. If it didn’t work try step 5 again. And make sure mode dial is on “M” and you’re on
___movie recording setting.
17. Go to “M” Symbol in the Magic Lantern menu (on the far right).
18. Select “Load Modules”. Now you should see “raw_rec ok” with a green dot next to it.
19. Go to the menu with the camera symbol.
20. Select the “RAW video” tab.
21. Go to height and set it to “1080″.
22. In the same menu then press “Start”. And you’re rolling!
23. You will see the camera capturing (or dropping frames…)
24. To stop press the “trash button” again and select the highlighted option.
Note: If you’re dropping many frames you might have the wrong card selected in Canon’s folder menu.

The whole thing is still quite buggy and not very user friendly, but they are constantly working on it and getting it better. As mentioned before this is still in Alpha stage.

If you buy a Canon 5D mark III, please get it HERE to reward our efforts and PLEASE ALSO MAKE SURE YOU DONATE TO MAGIC LANTERN FOR MAKING THIS AWESOME DEVELOPMENT POSSIBLE: LINK

Workflow to end up with usable Quicktime ProRes 4444 files:

1. The camera produces .RAW files which need to be converted to something usable first.
___This can currently only be done in Windows with an app they wrote called raw2dng.
Update: They just released a OSX app for that: download HERE, info HERE
___If you’re on Windows don’t use the one in the package downloaded earlier. Get the .exe here: LINK
2. Get the raw2dng.exe together with your .RAW files into the same folder on the
___Windows computer.
3. Go to “Start” and “run…” or just in the search field type “cmd”, hit Enter. The
___command Terminal should open.
4. type “raw2dng M0000000.RAW targetprefix”.
___Instead of “M0000000.RAW” insert the filename of the .RAW file you want to convert.
___Instead of targetprefix type a prefix.
___“shot1″ as a prefix would make files like shot1000000.dng.
5. The .dng files that come out of this are raw files you can open in several programs. We
___found it can only be opened with Adobe programs which is unfortunate as this makes
___the workflow even more complicated. It did not work in DaVinci Resolve which offers
___a very quick and painless DNG conversion process.
6. Next we had to put the files for each shot into separate folders.
7. In AfterEffects the .dng files can be converted to any format you like. We chose to
___convert to ProRes 4444.
8. We imported the files into an empty project by selecting only the first file of each
___.dng sequence.
9. The RAW dialogue pops up. At this point you can color correct with the Adobe
___RAW tool, but we wanted to do a final grading later.
___So we just corrected the wrongly set “tint” value from +77 down to +30.
10. The file imports, but is interpreted as 30fps. To change that for the next shots we
___changed the default framerate in the AfterEffects preferences menu to “24″.
11. Right clicked the imported file and clicked “set proxy” to “movie”.
12. On the Render Dialogue that now pops up we set Render Settings to “Best Settings”
___and created a new Output Module for Quicktime ProRes 4444.
13. The rendering took forever and After Effects crashed numerous times.
___We really don’t like that application for this kind of workflow, sorry Adobe.
___If you find a better way to do this please post it in the comments.
14. Thankfully 3 hours later our 13 minutes of footage was converted on our high end iMac.

We ‘re certain the workflow will be improved very soon. At this time it is still a hassle to get these .RAW files to convert to something useful. When all the tools are here this will be amazing, groundbraking, revolutionary. Why? Because the images the 5D produces are wonderful, clean, strong in lowlight and it has a large sensor. All things which you don’t get in any othr RAW camera at this time and certainly not at this pricepoint.

Please stay tuned for some awesome test shots from us which we are editing and uploading right now. We will keep you updated.

All credit is given to author cinema5DSebastian Wöber