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I think supporting old cameras makes them useful to someone, which mean less e-waste. It is a good thing in general
And it makes better video quality and other options accessible to people who can not afford professional gear, which is great

I've done a little bit of youtube videos with 5D2 (nothing special), we also made a test commercial using this camera and a fashion video. And I shot thousands of clips with it in RAW just for fun or testing some lenses or other stuff.
So I can say there are some limitations.

1. It doesn't have an articulated screen, and sometimes it is hard to see what is going on depending on the situation. For example, you can't just flip the screen and record yourself for youtube.
And if you connect an external display, it may not work with RAW video, I don't really remember if you can use it, at least I think in some crop modes it won't work. And when you go into the menu or do other stuff, it is painfully slow - the display stays black for a second or two, while the built-in display works instantly.
Even if you connect an external monitor, you have a big nice display, but you still need to control everything from the camera so you have to get up, go and do whatever you need, but you can't see what is going on because the internal screen is off, while HDMI is connected..
If you have a remote for recording start and stop, you still can not review your footage without going to the camera.. And you need to be able to check your footage quickly because sometimes you don't know whether it was a good take or not, or you are not really sure if it was even recording because it could stop sometimes.
So working with an external HDMI display is not really convenient.

2. When working with RAW it takes some time to switch between x10 and normal view for focusing purposes (because it enters crop-mode with x5 or maybe some other stuff). If you bind the half-shutter for x10 magnification and do it this way, it could crash the camera. So focusing also takes more time with RAW, but could be done.

3. You can not review your raw footage in real-time, sometimes you think it looks OK, but later when you process your clips on the computer you see it is too shaky or something else.

4. You need an expensive fast and big CF card, or even a few cards.

5. You need to have a good computer, not just some 10yrs old garbage, a lot of free HDD space and processing ML RAW takes more time, also copying files from the card takes more time, etc.

6. 5D2 drains battery rather quickly so you need an adaptor and some external battery or a powersupply, that's not a problem but anyway.

7. Sometimes it is difficult to use it with a stabilizer, because you don't have an articulated screen and you can't remote control everything. Even if you use a small HDMI display it will add weight or if you mount it on the bottom of the stabilizer (mechanical one, like steadicam) then you can just kick it with your leg or something, or hit something with it by accident.. Not an ideal solution anyway.


And I am sure I forgot other things that makes this camera less user-friendly for some work... Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining, it is just what I found.
But I love the colors you can get with RAW video and how you can push it in any direction and the image will not fall apart like h.264 would do. There is something very nice in RAW and I absolutely love it


If we could have an option to connect a small external monitor for framing, while built-in screen will stay at 10x zoom for focusing, and some options like maybe a remote control for camera buttons, and maybe better clip review preformance.. Then it could become a very useful camera for some serious work.

I also think you can do some serious projects with ML, but you need to have a team. So you will be focused on the camera only, and other people will do other stuff. But such projects usually have a budget to use more professional gear and they probably won't consider ML-enabled cameras for their work.

Maybe I am wrong but I remember some flashes or wireless flash triggers could deactivate expo simulation automatically, as long as they are attached to the camera. You need to google this if you want to know more, maybe I am just imagining stuff here... But I know this is an issue with 600D and seems like someone mentioned something about specific flashes..
It was many years ago, so I could be wrong

Awesome! I'll try this new 550D build

10/12 bits for 5D2 was there for a very long time, I almost never experienced any problems with the build on the "experiments" page. I have recorded thousands of clips with this build, it is very stable.

Is there any hope for lossless action  ?

Yeah lossless is something that could make a lot of difference for these cameras..


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I have recorded a few clips, then battery died
It seems like they are perfectly fine! No pink frames or anything suspicious.. Tried both mlv_lite and raw_rec.
Up to 6 seconds with 1728x724 (max width 1,39 ar) 23,976 fps. This is actually not bad at all! With some slo-mo in post this camera could be used as a b-roll cam

And mlv_play doesn't work, it is counting but the frames are black.

For some reason I had two laptops where built-in SD card readers just stopped working..
I would recommend you to get a good card reader, you can get usb 3.0 card reader which should be faster than built-in reader anyway. I have a few cheap generic $1 readers, and they work, but kind of slow (20mb/s max). Although built-in readers were only about 12mb/s.
Interesting thing but some SD cards work reliably only in one card reader and others prefer another one

I can't say for 5D3 but I have used anamorphic lenses with 5D2 in 3x3 mode. And in any builds that I have tried you can select whatever you want, full sensor area (2:3), 3:4 or anything else. So at least in standard builds I think it should be possible for 5D3. 3x3 requires less speed so you don't really need to overclock or do anything specific.
And I also found that with 2x anamorphic lenses you get a lot less aliasing, it works almost like an anti-aliasing filter. So 3x3 mode is perfectly useable.

I'm glad he is ok, although it would be interesting to know why he decided to abandon his channel..

Very, very nice option! I hope it will be ported to other cameras at some point. Great job!

Almost no delay, I used audio trigger to take a photo when I clap my hands.. Useful when you want to avoid camera shake on a tripod. Like a poor man's remote control

Maybe with 5d3 it is not as much of a crop, although 1.6 crop is still significant.. But if you can really push this camera to 4k it will be even less crop.


At the same time, cameras like 5d2 will only have somewhat useable 2,7k, which means 2x crop.

And I have lenses for example 20mm, 37mm, lots of 50mm and some 65, 80 and so on.
So with 2x crop I will only use 20mm because 37 is not sharp enough.

While with full frame I can use whatever I want, all cheap and fast 50mm lenses with lots of bokeh and character..
For example you can find 50mm f1.4 for...$50 if you are lucky enough. But you need ~35mm to get the same FOV with 1.6 crop factor, and 35mm f1.4 will cost you.... a lot. Probably more than the camera itself.


And for guys with 700D or 650D using 1x1 will mean even smaller sensor area than micro 4/3 and it is just so tiny they need to invest in absolutely different lenses for their cameras to use this mode. Unless you like your kit lens and happy with it.. And maybe already have some wide angle lenses.. It will depend on what you have.

It's just because you can use more sensor area with them...

And it is just more convenient with your usual full frame lenses, so these modes are desirable.


I think they are not cinematic by themselves, (1x3 looks worse than 1x1) but the combination of some lenses and large sensor area could look more cinematic or just pleasant to one's eyes.

You can also try another USB cable with your cardreader if it has one.. I tried a few before I found the one that worked better.

I was talking about 3x1 image sample because this is a thread about 3x1 I believe?
 
1x1 looks good by default... Sorry if I wasn't clear enough

So, you can see now these green and red pixels everywhere.. And what could be done to remove them? I don't even know, things like CA desaturation will work at extreme settings, at the same time significantly reducing the image quality...

If you are talking about this video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l9u-nfAwaV8

It doesn't have a lot of things where you can evaluate the amount of artifacts after the vertical stretching...
And also he moves the camera like crazy and there is not enough time to even notice anything.

Just remember, 590 is a very small amount of pixels. So it is not ideal by any means..

Are you taking about the noise or aliasing?

The noise could be reduced by exposing properly, aliasing will be bad anyway and while you can get rid of some color artifacts by using CA desaturation, it will decrease the quality.. It is better to plan your shots avoiding busy high contrast detailed patterns, and using vintage lenses wide open also helps because they generally aren't that sharp, it could work like some sort of an anti-aliasing filter..

It would be great to see some more recent tests.. I was constantly getting these green and red vertical stripes everywhere with 3x1 mode on 5D2, maybe it was not that bad as illustrated above but they were kind of annoying anyway


By the way I tried to switch the camera in 3x1 now, to make some samples, and can't do it for some reason.. Well, it switches but there is some kind of framerate problem, I spent maybe an hour right now already and it just doesn't work.. Who knows why. These modes are really unreliable..

[3x3 Readout 1736x1160]

Just my two cents - I experimented with 3x1 on 5d2 a lot (because there is no 1x3 preset for it) and honestly I still prefer regular 3x3..
Why? Because maybe 3x1 gives more details, but it also introduces a lot of artefacts. And they are really annoying..
It is almost exactly as illustrated here:

3x3 Readout 1736x1160


3x1 Readout 5208x1160 Upscaled to 5208x3478



So as you can see, while 3x3 is much less detailed, it is also more organic. And I prefer 3x3 in this case.. It is also much easier to use, no bugs and real-time preview, takes less card space and provides wider angle because 3x1 is still somewhat cropped..
This is why I prefer it although in theory 3x1 should be better.

Maybe about a year ago, when Bilal did his SD overclock for digic 5 family, he made some test builds to test if 550D SD controller could be switched to higher frequencies. But unfortunately it didn't work back then. There could be two possible reasons - maybe digic 4 just has completely different SD controller, or maybe it is not possible at all, at least without HW modifications.

By the way SD extender is not really necessary to measure stuff, one can just open a standard microSD - SD adapter and solder some thin wires there

I've read a Bilal's comment about a maybe not so difficult porting a part of his work for Digic 5 to Digic 4 .

It is not that easy, we did some tests in the past but the speed was not increasing. Maybe different registers or something totally different for digic 4, but it is not just an easy port...

How lucky you are! I missed it
It was an interesting video

Very nice progress! Really, especially mlv_play speed increase could be very useful! Will it be ever ported to other cameras? Like 5D2..

as CF in IDE mode is subset of IDE and UDMA is also part of ATA.

So, is it possible to connect a fast IDE hard drive with just passive adapter and the camera would work? I thought Canon use UDMA-something, and it is not supported by HDD, only by CF cards..

Well, I wish there would be a working inexpensive ML-compatible SSD to CF adapter.
Or even SD to CF with at least 60mb/s performance..

Here an example of this board

https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005005626437583.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.3.76cb43a3v6VTCT&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40050.281175.0&scm_id=1007.40050.281175.0&scm-url=1007.40050.281175.0&pvid=f49fa7fa-931d-4206-a954-2a243ea23c7f&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40050.281175.0,pvid:f49fa7fa-931d-4206-a954-2a243ea23c7f,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238109%231935&isseo=y&pdp_npi=4%40dis%21EUR%2118.07%218.31%21%21%2119.22%21%21%4021059dbe16925524548822545e49bd%2112000033794998808%21rec%21FR%211697255887%21A

This thing looks like SD to Sata adapter and it will probably not work in reverse, it is just a consumer product to replace expensive SSD drive with a cheap SD card where the speed is not an issue. I am 99% sure it will not work in reverse.. SD interface is simple but emulating SD card is much harder, so I don't think they implemented it because most people will just use this board as an alternative to SSD.

You can even see some linear voltage regulators on the board, to provide the power to the SD card and chips so it was designed to go in one direction only

Nice, but pink sun in the first shot