Yesterday we had the big news about Magic Lantern's big breakthrough: the ability to actually shoot with two different ISOs on the sensor at once. This is quite a technological leap from the previous hacks, as it is actually modifying how the sensor operates at a very base level. We've got a brief comparison from Michael Anthony showing off what the new hack can do, and we've also got some RAW Dual ISO samples from Luke Neumann for you to play around with.
Here are the settings used by Michael Anthony in the test:
Camera: 5D Mark III (shot 24fps at 1080p)
Dual ISO was set to use 100 and 1600 ISO.
Footage was shot in a dimly lit room with both a tungsten lamp and dark areas in the frame.
Shot handheld to reveal any moire or aliasing which may increase using Dual ISO feature.
Raw was converted to DNGs using the newest rawtodng.exe.
Postprocessing via Adobe Camera Raw using identical settings for both Normal Raw and Dual ISO shots...
Exposure was brought up a bit to +2.8
Highlights -100,
Shadow +70,
Sharpening 0,
Noise Reduction 0,
All other settings were at 0 or default values
Exported via After Effects to intermediate AVI files (Cineform 444 Filmscan 1)
Edited in Premiere Pro CS6 and rendered to H.264 1080p (10Mbps).
[Update]: Michael recently uploaded a new video:
I've had a number of people ask how raw video "Denoised" would fare compared to the results obtained using the Dual ISO feature. So here's another test comparing exactly that.
Ran a moderate level of denoising using Neat video. I tried to retain as much detail as possible to prevent the footage from becoming too plasticky.
This is one shot of the sample video shot by Luke in anamorphic:
From the samples I've seen so far there are still some issues to work out. There will likely be aliasing and moire no matter what you do, but different debayering methods can help. If you've read a1ex's PDF, you'll know there is a lot of really complicated calculations going on in order to compensate for the fact that the camera is shooting two different ISOs at once. As I said before, I think this will be useful for special cases when you are dealing with really tough contrast ratios, not necessarily something you would use on a daily basis. Things could improve, and it's best to keep that in mind with any of these hacks -- especially since there has been almost no testing and the code is in the very early stages.
You can download Luke's sample footage here (it's anamorphic so you will have to de-squeeze it a bit).
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