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Several cameras use the same PCB, is it possible that Canon have a standard SD Card PCB and maybe the higher Canon models just use an up-spected PCB?

anyone know of a link to the spare parts for the higher spec cameras?

Maybe a few models share the same part, but the majority of them have different parts, which likely means each camera has a unique SD PCB custom-built specifically for that model.  The only Canon camera that possesses an SD slot spec'd above 40MB/s is the 7D Mark II which probably has the 104MB/s part.

In a perfect world, you could just open up a 70D and a 7D2, move the 7D2's PCB to the 70D, maybe do a small FW hack, and it would work.  The chances that would actually work, let alone the chance that the 7D2's PCB would actually fit into a 70D, are pretty damn small.

The 70D only has a single Digic 5+ processor, not two.  Even if it did have two, and disabling AF left one of them totally dedicated to copying bits from the sensor to storage, a dedicated Digic 5+ CPU still wouldn't be fast enough to do it at 24fps.  The 5D Mark III also has a single Digic 5+ processor and that camera must also use the EDMAC to copy data to storage in real-time.

I'm sure this is also just as unlikely, but I'm wondering if it would be even remotely possible to open up a 70D and swap the stock SD slot with a 104MB/s part.  If it were possible, I'd try it, working with hardware is something I like doing.

what do you mean?

The pink/blue dots on the 650D and 700D are "focus pixels" which perform contrast-detection when autofocus is enabled in video mode, instead of recording color information.  Normally these are thrown away, but they are kept when recording raw.  The 70D has a totally different video AF system and shouldn't have that problem.

I'm surprised the 50D low-light performance is listed as "average" with its larger pixels.  I know pixel size isn't everything, but I would consider it at least "good."  I guess that's just kind of a subjective thing though.

Also wouldn't the 700D have the same resolutions as the 650D?  Same SD slot speed, same sensor size...

Last thing - wouldn't it be helpful to have a max continuous 24fps resolution in "squashed" mode (where you stretch by 1.4x vertically in post)?

Hey ShootMeAlready, sorry man but you are wrong
1 The CPU is not the 6, is the 5+
2 AF point is 19 .

I have a question the problem with the writing speed is for the camera or memory? if the answer is memory, we can get a memory with 95/MBs to 280/MBs and the problem gonna be solved...

Neither... it's the SD slot.  It's a gimped UHS-I bus with a max rate of 41MB/s.  You can use the fastest SD card on the planet and it will still be 41MB/s.

We talked earlier about attaching a USB card reader to the camera's USB port... if ML ever made that possible, I'd skip the card reader and just plug in a USB flash drive.  I've got a 64GB USB 3.0 stick that writes at 175MB/s, it would be amazing if I could just write date to that thing!  Only problem is there is currently no Canon DSLR that offers USB 3.0 that doesn't also offer a CF slot...

Last week I finally got around to putting ML on my 700D, and I shot a simple, quick promo video for a friend who just started his own recording studio and produces beats.  I mostly made this video to both test out the new 24mm f/2.8 prime lens, to experiment with slow motion and Twixtor, and to familiarize myself with ML and see what I could do with some of its features.  It was also just made for a bit of fun.

This was shot on Canon's recently-released 24mm f/2.8 STM pancake prime lens (STM AF left off, I only have it on when using it with my 70D).  Slow motion clips were shot at 720p 60fps with bit rate set to 3.0x CBR (~130Mbps), stretched by 250% from 60fps to 24fps, then stretched another 200% to interpolated 12fps using Twixtor to ultimately achieve 5x slow down.  Unfortunately the Twixtor effect had to be removed from certain frames due to some awful warping, and there are other areas where I chose to keep smaller warping artifacts for the sake of preserving smooth motion.  I ignored the 180d rule and left shutter speed at 1/60 as I wanted more motion blur.  The last clip was shot raw at 1280x720 24fps, mostly just to learn the raw workflow.  Noise was cleaned up with Neat Video, with slight sharpening applied on top of that.  All post work, including basic color grading, was done between After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Ultimately I learned that Twixtor should only be used for very short segments and it can't really be relied on for applying to whole clips.  I thought about overcranking to 70fps and stretching to 30fps, but setting 65fps and 70fps still resulted in 59.94fps, and I don't know enough about FPS override to mess around with the advanced parameters.  I also could not get exact 60fps like I wanted, and 59.94 doesn't go into 23.976 as neatly as 60 into 24, which may have cause some slight judder.  In addition, the 700D is limited to IPB compression, and I think the difference between IPB and All-I is magnified with slow motion.

Anyway, here it is, hope you enjoy!

Looks damn good for h264.  Default bitrate? All-I?

What did you use to get such smooth camera movement?  Just a handheld stabilizer?

Sorry DV I updated my post on the usb 3.0, as it appears it was prior to official release.  However once released it did not materialize.

Yeah with the 7D2 they specifically make a point to say it's 3.0.  If they didn't with the 70D, I'm sure it's 2.0.

I do know that the 70D inherited the 90 MB/s All-I compression from the 5D MarkIII, so its got to have superior throughput processing somewhere? that can be tapped.

All-I plus 3.0x CBR should be at least bit of a step up.  I wonder if the h264 encoder will actually be able to handle ~35MB/s without stopping.  Does anyone know if that works on the 5D3?

You're wrong

You can just drop the least significant bits without loosing much image quality, b/c these bits are mostly just noise anyway (if you lost anything, it would mostly be very dark, noisy shadow detail). The "correct" or "best" way to reduce bit depth would be to round with a little bit of random noise thrown in (for dither), but there won't be a whole lot difference between that and just dropping the bits (it certainly wouldn't "ruin" the picture).

But even just doing something like dropping bits is too time consuming to be able to do it in real-time with the dinky little ARM CPU.

ML Raw recording doesn't even use the CPU to transfer the raw data from the raw buffer to the SD/CF card because the CPU is too slow for even that (just a direct copy). Instead we use some special hardware called the EDMAC. This special hardware device can move data around memory very quickly without incurring CPU overhead. Without the discovery of this hardware and figuring out how to use it, raw recording would not have been possible.

So, if we also want to do something like change the bit depth of raw data, we need to find some hardware that can do it for us fast enough, because while it would be very easy to write some code to do this, the code would never be able to run fast enough on the ARM CPU (b/c like I mentioned previously, even a simple direct copy isn't even fast enough). To date we haven't found such hardware or at least if it's there, we don't know how to use it. In the link I posted there is some indication it *might* be possible, should we ever figure out how to use the hardware mentioned in that thread to do this sort of thing.

Thanks for explaining all that    Good to know that about bit depth.

The specs say USB 3.0, which means much faster than 40 MB/s. 

http://www.cameraegg.org/canon-eos-70d-specs-new-sensor-digic-6-usb-3-0-gps/


Now the DLRfilmnoob found that usb 3.0, wrote twice as fast to fast cards as usb 2.0.  Since more than a few folks have noted that actual usb 2.0 reader speeds max at 35 MB/s
this at first estimate suggests a 70 MB/s card write speed.

http://www.dslrfilmnoob.com/2014/02/01/usb-3-0-card-reader-speeds-matters/

Which by the way, assumes your USB 3.0 connects to a card writer, how about instead a SSD drive   Now that would be fast!

But perhaps with ML on a 70D, the USB 3.0 maybe fast enough to refresh EOS utility (as it runs on 5D MkIII) which gets you into AF raw video on a 27" touchscreen. 

Interesting.  Maybe there is some potential there? Seems unlikely the camera would be able to drive the device, but I'm no expert on this stuff (yet )

The 7D Mark II is just short of being my ideal camera.  The only 2 things I want that it lacks is a touchscreen for touch AF and a sensor big enough to capture raw video at 1920 width.  It's unfortunate that the CF slot is fast enough to record full 1920x1080 raw like the 5D3, but the sensor is just a hair too small to reach 1920.  The max width will be 1824, which is obviously close but still not pixel-for-pixel after stretching (unless I'm misunderstanding something about how ML raw video works).  Because of these 2 things, I don't think it's worth the money to me, even if ML was ported to it. I guess I keep waiting! 

You could use an OTB (USB 3) cable to connect to the camera, and the writer.
The question becomes can ML use this device???  Perhaps a s/w driver is needed. I wonder if there is an Digic/ARM config. to use it.
I like the USB port connection because unlike the HDMI it doesn't blank the LCD screen, so if we can bypass the slow ass internal card writer ...

Does the 70D have a 3.0 or 2.0 USB port? I assumed 2.0 but I could be wrong.  The maximum theoretical throughput of 2.0 is 60MB/s but for reasons beyond me (overhead etc) you pretty much never see any USB 2.0 connection ever going above 35MB/s, so we wouldn't gain anything there.

Agree but it is what it is.  How do you know the 7D Mark II has 75mb/s?  Also I think Magic Lantern Chooses not to do 8, 10, 12 bit RAW and i think it should be an option.  It's silly and i do not believe their reasoning behind it.  I really think we can push these cameras to 1080p + if we had the ability to do 10 Bit RAW.

Unfortunately it doesn't really work like that.  The image sensor in these cameras natively uses 14 bits to determine what color a pixel will be. Recording images in 12-bit color instead of 14-bit color would actually require the camera to do extra work. In fact it probably takes the same amount of processing work as converting to 8-bit like it already does.  Raw essentially works by taking the full sensor readout, bypassing the h264.ini, and dumping that data directly onto the card without any modification.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can just "drop" the 2 or 4 least significant bits of a color value without completely ruining the whole picture.  You wouldn't just lose the range, you'd end up with an entirely different color for every pixel.  To convert from 14-bit to any other bit-depth, you'd have to run through an encoder again, and I'm 99% sure the h264.ini cannot be modified to do anything other than 8-bit.

Oh yeah, 7D2 slot speed: http://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/canon-7d-mark-ii/fastest-sd-cf-card-comparison/

Well, you just open it in a text editor and change it. But, you sort of have to know how to code first. I assume that if you did know how to code, you probably wouldn't be asking this. Learning how to code is fairly easy. But a lot of ML stuff is rather complicated and requires much more than basic coding knowledge, and may also require reverse engineering. And even an advanced coder it make take some time just to get familiar with the ML code base (which is rather large and not particularly well documented). It just depends on what you're trying to do.

How about something small like changing the maximum h264 bit rate value that can be chosen? I only have basic coding knowledge and I haven't even looked at the ML source code yet, but that would be the first thing I'd try. Would that be a particularly difficult thing for a noob programmer to alter without breaking everything?

[in addition]

You guys are overreacting.  40MB/s is good enough especially since the 6D is the same and i have gotten some great RAW video on the 6D.  If i remember correctly,  With a 64GB 95MB/s Sandisk card,  i was able to shoot over a minute at 1600x600 and roughly 45-55 seconds at 1792xXXX with 2:35:1 aspect ratio.  I went from a 45MB/s card and was told on this forum it would not be much of a difference but it was.  it doubled my recording time.  So the Card you put into the camera does matter.  Lets just hope the Dual AF works well with RAW video.

It's not "good enough" when UHS-1 slots can reach 104MB/s.  I'm not even talking about UHS-II, this is the UHS-I slot that is already in the 70D and other less expensive Canon DSLRs.  I think it's kinda bullcrap that the 7D Mark II has an SD card slot that reaches 75MB/s in addition to its CF card slot (redundant) while the 70D only has the 1 SD slot and it's limited to 40MB/s.

I almost wish these Canon DSLRs shot raw at 12-bit instead of 14-bit.  Obviously that makes them worse for still photography, which is their primary purpose, but when it comes to video the most noticeable improvement comes from 8-bit to 10-bit, above that it's hard to notice.  I know if these cameras shot raw video at 12-bit instead of 14-bit, we could definitely fit higher resolutions through that 40MB/s bus.  This is why I wish we could set higher than 3.0x bit rate for h264 shots.

I've got a few questions about using and understanding bit rate control in ML.

1. What exactly does Qscale do? Is it the same thing as "slice control" from Tragic Lantern? Does it change any other parameters?
2. Does BR control in ML adjust the GOP value at all? Is it even possible to record All-I on cameras that are normally limited to IPB?
3. Regarding the bit rate info overlay, there are 4 boxes.  Obviously A and B are pretty easy to understand, but I don't understand the green box (has a variable percentage) or the red box (always says Q+-1).  Could someone explain to me what these 2 boxes refer to?
4. Just out of curiosity - why is CBR limited to 3.0? Is there a limitation with the hardware or the encoder? Or is this just for user-friendliness? I'd love to see what 300Mbps would look like on these cameras.

• Write speed for UHS-I sd card is max ~40MB/s (no difference to 6D / 700D)
• Unfortunately we will encounter this same bug as on 6D (in fact actually it's a usable 8-10 seconds)

The 40MB/s is disappointing, but expected.  This is Canon after all, and they know good and well what they're doing.  They could have easily put a SDR104 (UHS-I 104MB/s) slot/bus in this camera for likely the same or minimally higher production cost, but they're aware of ML and they'll make sure it's literally impossible to shoot full 1080p raw on anything other than that $3.5K 5D3 (and maybe now the 7D2).  Even if there's some way to get clean 422 HDMI out of the 70D (highly unlikely), I dont think touch-focus will work with it, and it's still 8-bit.  Do you know yet if it's possible to go beyond 1728 width? Being able to shoot 1920 wide would be cool, even if that meant heavily cutting the video height.  I'm at least excited to shoot h264 All-I combined with 3x bit rate.  Should end up around 35MB/s and look a bit better than my 700D's IBP 3x compression.

All I want is a Canon camera that has both the dual-pixel CMOS touch-AF awesomeness of the 70D combined with the ability to shoot 1920x1080p24 raw.  I'm guessing the 7D Mark II will be able to shoot max res raw because of its CF slot, but the lack of a touchscreen really limits what the dual-pixel AF can do.  If there was a Canon camera like this in existence, I'd probably pay the huge price for it.  Guess I'll just keep waiting =P

Also, does the ML menu timeout occur every time the menu is accessed, or just sometimes? This same problem happens on my 700D, but only the first few times accessing the menu after boot.  After that, it stops timing out.

Oh, and great work again 

Gotcha, thanks for taking the time to explain =)

Thanks for the tip.  I actually found I was able to record at 3.0x CBR continuous just fine after disabling all overlays.  Footage looks great at 3.0

Just out of curiosity - does anyone know the explanation why this camera can't go beyond a width of 1728 in raw recording?  What would happen if the block was removed and you set it to something above 1728?

Finally got around to putting ML on my 700D this weekend, lots of fun. Focus peaking, zebras, HDR video, and raw/mlv video are my favorite features so far. 

The SD slot on this camera is rated for 40MB/s right?  My card (samsung pro) is rated for 80MB/s writes, but the ML benchmark seems always ends up in the 30-35MB/s range and recording will sometimes stop when CBR is set to 3.0x (with audio disabled) even though that should theoretically be fine.  If my card is the bottleneck here even though it's rated for well over 40MB/s, best believe I'll be returning it.

Is Alex the only person here capable of making a .fir?  I mean, it's almost seemed like he's been oddly against even the idea of a 70D port from the beginning for some strange reason. Doesn't make sense, but his early comments seemed to give off that vibe.  I think he's also kind of drifted away from working on ML as a whole lately, like he was fed up with it or something.

Many of us here, who've owned the 70D since its debut and have run ML on previous bodies find ourselves being pretty damn virtuous and in your same position.

My advice would be for people NOT to buy the 70D in hopes of using ML on it. Will be obsoleted by the next thing out before ML is working. Just not enough dev's and too many FW's out there, so ML dev's have to pick a battle and go with what's chosen. Sadly, it's not the 70D.

Tom, you could say that about ANY camera.  Not many people upgrade their camera every single time the next iteration comes out.  It's not like ML will be immediately available for the 80D or 800D either, and just because those cameras might not get a ML port until the next generation is around the corner doesn't mean they'll suddenly be obsolete when they get ML.  Most of us 70D owners probably bought one intending to keep it for a good long while, and since we do have a 70D ML port working in QEMU already, I think there's a good chance we will see it in practice while the 70D is still relevant.

The main advantage of the 70D is the touchscreen AF, with smooth continuous focus.  Yet for ML RAW shooting that's a problem, how do you set/check focus?
Using a HDMI out screen, means blanked LCD, and loss of touchscreen.
Using USB apps (laptop or Tablet/android), yes touchscreen AF is kept but the problem presently is no software supports MLV RAW.
You are left with shooting MLV raw off a 3" LCD, which means ML 5X-10X zoom is all you have.

I'm not following what you are saying here.  Yeah you're stuck with the 3" LCD if you wanna keep touchscreen AF while shooting RAW, but besides a larger view, what else do you gain using an HDMI output screen?

So many people ready and willing to test, hopefully we get a fir soon! 

I made my 70D repository available for public on bitbucket.
Remember: This is for QEMU and boots up in QEMU but the device tree (70D) should be fine to be used (copy & paste) with unified when you adjust the makefile. Sent a request for an installer fir weeks ago to a1ex but didn't get one.

I won't be held responsible for what you guys do with this. I doubt that some of you writing me PMs know what they do cause I got some strange questions but anyways I am just sharing what I did upon requests. I still recommend y'all to wait for nanomad but wish you luck with this if you still try it out. I cannot blindly do it. Btw in the meantime I had to sell my 6D so I am gone for now until Santa Claus puts a new cam under my tree.

Thanks for sharing it!  If someone makes an installation fir I might actually dare to try it.

[are]

For christ sake, if you're fortunate enough to own a pretty decent dslr like 70D make use of it rather than pleading devs and that lone person, who doesn't have camera but still does something. These things, they take time. Give them that time. In the meantime - use your gear to the fullest, study it, use it. There are bottlenecks, yes, but can get around a lot of things. It's far easier to have a more friendly software than it is canon's, but (except for the backers of 70D) we're getting this awesome stuff for free. Learn to use your equipment, rather than asking for someone to make it more usable.

Whoa there cowboy.  Chill out.  I think people are just excited at the prospect of what ML could do for their 70D, and they know it's close to being finished.  If Nomad is tied up, and nikfreak is capable of finishing it... well then I see no reason to have a problem with that?  Nobody is angrily demanding this port, we're just excited by the possibilities of a 70D+ML, which is now within arm's reach but on a snag.  And obviously we are using our cameras to the fullest extent - you don't need to tell us to do that.  Nobody is going to buy a $1K camera and let it sit there uselessly until the ML port is finished.  But let's be real here - no matter how much you work to maximize your footage quality within the limits of the default Canon FW, the h264 compression at the standard ~10-12Mbps bit rate still looks yucky.  My 70D has become my secondary camera for my video shoots now because my 700D is the one with ML at the moment.  So obviously we're anxious to see ML on these devices.

Hi DigitalVeil!
With 50D and Magic Lantern you can shoot H.264 at Full HD (1920x1080), or RAW Video at max. 1568 width (I think it's 1568x882).
There is a option to use digital zoom x5 - with that option you can record Full HD RAW Video. BUT even with the fastest card, the 50D sometimes stops in that mode, and also you can't use x5 zoom mode for the most situations.
Also the highest FPS you can set is 30fps.

I got a 50D and it's a great video camera for it's cheap price. But you can not really compare to a 5D Mk3, because of it's bigger sensor (good for low light) and it's Full HD Raw video option.

If you are looking at the price - the 50D is the best camera you can get for it's price. If you want the best video camera and can spend money - you can find better cameras.

Don't forget: 50D was a photo camera without video mode, so it does not have audio recording. Also don't forget the CF cards are expensive for RAW video, I have 2x KomputerBay 64GB 1050x, each one for 85€ (something around $100). I think you can record something around 15mins on 64GB - one minute RAW video is like 4GB.

Any other questions? Just ask me! :-)

Thanks so much for being so helpful and kind!  I appreciate the in-depth answer, that clears up all my questions!  The only other thing I'm wondering - does setting FPS to 24 allow a slightly larger resolution?

The main reason I'm interested in one is that I can pick up a used one for $350-400 and shoot RAW at above 720p and get better low-light performance than my 70D.  I don't know if I particularly need a 3rd DSLR on my video shoots, but at the price I could get one, why not?  Lack of audio is not a big problem for me, as I prefer recording audio to an external device anyway, but I didn't know about the price of CF cards and how fast they fill up with RAW.  Thanks for that info!

I'm tempted to pick up a 50D because of its CF slot and larger pixels for low light shots.

Is the max CF slot speed still 70MB/s?  If I'm shooting raw with 1920 width, what's the tallest frame height I can set for continuous shooting?  Or can I even have 1920 width at all?