Clean HDMI Will Be Coming to the Canon 7D
Good things continue to happen for the Canon 7D. With a rapidly changing camera landscape (and far too many options to choose from), many people are still holding on to their trusty DSLRs -- and that includes quite a few 7Ds. Just recently the first alpha of Magic Lantern was made available for the camera, and now it looks like clean HDMI may not be too far off. It's been available for other Canon DSLRs through the firmware hack for some time now, but this is the first testing that has been done for this camera. Check out the video below to see the first results in action.
Here is what ML developer g3ggode said about the video:
This is a test video where i filmed my Samsung LCD showing Canon EOS 7D HDMI output while recording. Test subject is the "Clear overlays" feature, that disables all paintings on HDMI output.
It's not quite clear what the final output for the HDMI will be, but the clean HDMI for the other Canon cameras did not give a full output. Here is that explanation from the Magic Lantern wiki site:
While these devices are capable of recording 1080p 422 signals, the HDMI output from the Canon HDMI is limited to 1620x1080 (3:2) while the camera is not recording. This requires the user to crop the footage from the external recorder to 1620x910 (16:9) and then resize it to either 1280x720 (79%) or 1920x1080 (119%).
I'm not 100% sure if this will be the exact case with this camera (someone can correct me if this is wrong). The big difference is that the 7D outputs a 1280 x 720 image while recording to the internal CF card, instead of the 720 x 480 of the Canon 5D, 60D, etc., so you could theoretically recording two places at once. Clean HDMI doesn't all of a sudden turn your camera into a RAW recording device, but the extra color space it provides (4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0) can be helpful for many situations, including green screen work.
If you haven't seen it, here's a video of the newly released alpha firmware working on the camera:
I'm sure it's possible we may get even more capabilities once the 7D is really unlocked (since it has two image processors instead of one), but for now you can get all of the basic Magic Lantern features in the alpha release. Head on over to the ML site using the link below if you'd like to try out the firmare hack for your Canon 7D.