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I was really interested to see how camera makers reps would respond to questions about installing custom firmware on their cameras. I approached Canon, Nikon & Panasonic customer service departments with a simple question:

Dear Canon/Nikon/Panasonic,

I would like to use Magic Lantern/Nikon Hacker / Ptool with my 5DmkII/D7000/GH2 and was wondering if it will void my warranty.

all my best,
udi

Both the short version, No, Yes, Yes and a longer more detailed one after the jump. Click to continue ›

Nikon advertises their D3s as a war tank that can withstand some serious damage. French site pixelistes took it to the test. And when I say "took it to the test" I mean beat the living juice out of it.

Aside from using the D3s under running water, soaking it in a tub, dropping it from a car, dumping the camera in a swamp, freezing it in a block of ice and setting it on fire, they were actually pretty soft with it.

Surprisingly the camera lived to tell the tale. Albeit with some of the plastic molten. I guess this is how Nikon justifies the $6,799 price tag. (Movie after the jump, not for the faint of heart) Click to continue ›

A little while back we shared a nifty tutorial on making an LCD hood from a set of hotel keys. Today we are taking it up a notch with a follow up pictorial on making it a fully fledged LCD Lope Click to continue ›

With Magic Lantern recent 24P raw video hack I thought it may be a good idea to go over each of the big manufacturers and review are the options for anyone who is trying to use a custom Firmware on their camera

A few days back we reported about the Magic Lantern team hacking a 5DmkIII to shoot 24p RAW video (probably the best thing that ever happened to Canon, even if they did not mean that).

While this was super good news, the process of getting the files out of the camera and convert them to a RAW video was a bit cumbersome involving windows, mac, and after effects.

The good folks at Cinema5D just released a video explaining the fasted workflow to get a 5DmkII ML RAW file stream to RAW video. (movie after the jump) Click to continue ›

Here are some great news for the photographers/makers out there. Raspberry Pi just released their camera module into the world.

This is a 5MP camera which uses a similar imaging core (though different optics and sensor) to the Nokia N8. The camera module costs $25 and is available to order from MCM or Element 14 (North America) and RS or Farnell (Europe).

The board adds a 5MP camera to the Raspberry Pi board and can take static images with resolution up to 2592X1944, and stream video both 1080p, or 720p and as with any Raspberry Pi project where you take it from here is entirely up to you. Having a fully customizable camera for $60 ($35 Pi board + $25 Camera module) is not a trivial thing. Click to continue ›

I have said it many times before. A slider is probably the first gadget you want to get if you are going into videography. It is one of the fastest ways to add production value to a movie.

It is also great for doing motion timelapse and almost all the time lapse movies we feature on the blog have some sort of sliding motion. And while getting a set of wheels on a rail may seem trivial, there has been a lot of innovation with this over the last year. It seems that even a triviality like a slider has ample space for innovation. Click to continue ›

Have you ever got stuck out side of your hotel room with the plastic keys not working and decided to go on a photowalk, but it was too sunny to read the LCD? Have you? Really wanted an LCD hood, but could not find one.

Well, you're in luck because master pictorial maker Maciej Pietuszynski has just what you need - a Hotel Room Key to LCD hood pictorial. It has little text and great step by step pictures for you to follow.

If you are living anywhere on this little planet of ours and are subscribed to any of the blogs about photography, videography, HDSLR, or cinematography you are probably aware that the Magic Lantern team has a firmware that can shoot RAW video on a Canon 5Dmk3 in up to 3592x1320 resolution.

While this is not an official release by Canon, and so far I have not seen any response from their PR department or from other reps, I think that this is the best thing that Canon could have wished for. Click to continue ›

Yesterday we shared that the Magic Lantern team managed to pull a RAW HD stream from the Canon 5DmkIII and today EOSHD shares some hands on with this mode achieving good quality 2.5K (2880 x 1320) and even 3.6K (albeit with some frames dropped).

This is in addition to a new announcement on the ML facebook page, where they share that they implemented double buffering on RAW for the mkII and mkIII.

This double buffering will reduce screen tearing on shot footage.

Screen tearing is "glitch" that shows up when two frames are mashed up in a video stream. An artifact that ML's double buffering seems to reduce.

A few videos and more info after the jump. Click to continue ›