Canon 7D HDSLR DSLR VDSLRFor all of you out there with a Canon 7D who have been salivating at the prospect of shooting RAW video on your camera with Magic Lantern, things just got a whole lot more interesting. A1ex, one of the lead developers on the whole ML project, has discovered the silent pictures function, which allows the camera to save the RAW files from Live View. That's exactly how the RAW hack began on the Canon 5D Mark II and Mark III back in April. Click through for more on this announcement and what resolutions you can expect.

Right now it's not currently shooting a video frame rate, but it's only a matter of when, not if, the RAW module is ported over to the 7D. So when it does happen, what frame size can you expect to be shooting? A1ex updated this chart showing where the 7D should stand when the RAW module finds its way onto the 7D (click for larger):

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As you can see above, the 7D won't quite hit 1080 in RAW, and continuous 24p recording may be around 1728 x 972. That number isn't set in stone yet, but performance won't likely be better than the 60D in terms of resolution because they share the same sensor and likely the same way of downscaling the sensor. What is different and exciting, however, is that the 7D has a CF card slot, and the controller and the cards are both faster than SD, which means you'll actually be able to get continuous recording at a higher resolution (which again may be around 1728 x 972). The 60D can only record higher res for a short amount of time.

To give you a sense of the kind of quality you can expect coming out of the 7D continuously, here is some stuff shot on the 60D at very high-resolution, but only for a limited amount per take (since it uses SD cards). The first is from Nick Driftwood shot at 1728 x 992:

Here is one from Jayhas shot at 1728 x 736, followed by a RAW/H.264 comparison shot at the same resolution (H.264 is 1080):

While the Mark III is still the best quality from the ML hack, the 7D should be right up there with the Mark II since you can get pretty close to 1080 without cropping the sensor and also use CF cards to do it continuously. You'll be able to get higher resolutions by cropping into the sensor, but the crops can really only be used for special cases since the crop is significant. The 7D is still a fantastic photography camera, and with RAW, it's going to be that much better of a video camera. While the Mark III is also the only Canon in this range that doesn't suffer from aliasing/moire, you could always buy a Mosaic Engineering VAF filter for the 7D, which should remove lots of those nasty artifacts. Those will run you about $300.

Even though you will need to scale a little to get the image to full 1080, it's still going to look, much, much better than the H.264 ever did.

Head on over to the Magic Lantern forum if you'd like to get started shooting silent pictures before the RAW video module is implemented.

Links:

[via Magic Lantern Twitter]

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Cinematography & Cameras