Magic Lantern updates for Canon EOS 7D, Canon Rebel T4i, Canon EOS 5D Mark III and more!

Posted on 31. Dec, 2012 by planetmitch

It is right at the end of the year and the amazing folks over at Magic Lantern have issued updates for several Canon HDSLRs and announcements on new cameras in the works.

Well, December 21st passed and no apocalypse happened. That means… you are no longer afraid to run some bleeding edge code on your cameras, are you?

So, here’s the second alpha for the 7D ML. As the name suggests, it’s still an alpha, which means:

some features are missing

some features might be enabled but they don’t work

some features might crash or disturb normal operation

your camera won’t get modified (boot flag), you have to load ML into RAM manually (firmware upgrade function)

Why?

we are not done yet

you all want to have a preview and as much ML as possible at the moment

we need your feedback to find bugs

Magic Lantern Canon EOS 7D

Its time to release the second alpha version of the 7D port.

We’ve enabled these features since alpha 1:
* Advanced Bracketing (HDR)
* Intervalometer
* Audio tags
* Bit Rate manipulation
* [EXPERIMENTAL] Modify card flush rate for higher bit rates
* [EXPERIMENTAL] Modify GOP size (down to ALL-I or up to 100 for better (?) details)
* a lot of minor fixes

Key Features:
* Audio meters while recording
* Zebras
* Focus peaking
* Magic Zooom (via half-shutter, or focus ring)
* Cropmarks, Ghost image
* Spotmeter
* False color
* Histogram, Waveform
* Vectorscope
* Movie logging
* Movie auto stop
* Trap focus
* LiveView settings (brightness, contrast…)
* Level indicator
* Image review tweaks (quick zoom)
* and some debug functions

But:
* If anything goes wrong, we don’t pay for repairs. Use Magic Lantern at your own risk!

Known issues:
* You have to reload Magic Lantern every time you use it. (this is intentional)
* when using HDMI output, frame drops may happen (to be verified)
* make sure your battery/adaptor is chipped, else canon menu will abort “firmware update” (= loading ML)
* movie restart and video effects menus visible but not working

Here’s a boring (but very important) video of a stress test on the Canon EOS 7D version of Magic Lantern:

Canon Rebel T4i and others

But I don’t have a 7D!

Don’t worry, we have some nice surprises for you too:

650D (Canon Rebel T4i), 6D and 40D will be able to run Magic Lantern

There’s already an alpha port for EOS-M, including touch screen support.

The oldie, but goldie 5D classic already runs ML quite well - of course, with a limited feature set, for photo users only.

The 1100D port is almost finished, give it a try in the nightly builds.

For the veteran cameras – 5D Mark II, 550D, 60D, 600D, 50D and 500D – try the nightly builds to preview the latest feature set and help us polish it for the next stable release – v2.4.

5D Mark III users are encouraged to try the third ML alpha, which seems to be quite usable. For the advanced features you will have to wait a bit, but we hope that recent Digic V ports will help us find the missing piece from the puzzle.

So there are indeed many great things to be happy for in the new year! I’m constantly amazed at what the Magic Lantern team is doing and if you’ve used Magic Lantern and haven’t donated to the team, please consider doing so!

(cover photo credit: snap from the Magic Lantern update)