Recording to external recording device

[profoblivion]

I just found out that there's no ML version for the current Canon 5DMKIII firmware. Like everyone, I'm excited about the RAW potentials of the camera, but I'm not clear exactly for how long you can record internally in RAW, and whether or not CF cards can even support long periods of filming. My question is if it's possible to record in RAW to an external hard drive like Atomos Ninja 2, and if not, when that might be possible. Only when ML decides to upgrade to 5DMKIII's current firmware?

Thank you!

[Luigi_xp]

What you can record with an external recorder over HDMI in the lastest firmware is recording an uncompressed signal, which is different from RAW.
Uncompressed is processed on camera, but it doens't suffer from h.264 compressing artifacts;
RAW is the image as the sensor sees it; no preprocessing, and can only be recorded using CF card on the camera. The bitrate is VERY high and you can only record a few minutes with 32gb+ cards. And you need very fast cards too.
If you want a long recording time, use the built-in h.264 and tweak the profile settings (custom ones) to have the best picture, or use the uncompressed HDMI on the latest firmware to a external recording, but the files will be huge and the quality differences isn't too dramatic (google 5dmkiii uncompressed hdmi vs h264).
If you want an outstanding image, go for RAW, but you need fast, large (and expensive) cards.
1080p24 raw is 83,61 MB/s or 5GB per minute. so you need true 1000x cards that are expensive (lexars and sandisk extreme ones. komputerbay seems to work but they're of duvidous quality.)

[reddeercity]

Not possible, you will never be able to record raw to a hard drive recorder, just the HDMI stream which is
422 8bit. I post a video tutorial with the 5D2 and Ninja hard drive recorder , you might find it has useful
information . link below
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5533.msg102567#msg102567

[profoblivion]

@Luigi_xp -- I appreciate your input. I have owned and operated a Canon 5D for a while now, and have desperately tried to squeeze every last bit of data out of it that was possible. I agree that the difference between uncompressed and compressed is marginal, which is what led me to enquire about the possibility of recording RAW out from HDMI.

@reddeercity -- You say not possible... and never. Would you please explain why?

[Stedda]

In fact there is a ML version for current 5D III. http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=9827.0

and as far as HDMI out from what I've read here it wont happen. HDMI out is hardware encoder which ML has no control over and is unlikely to be modified even if they could.

[Luigi_xp]

And the HDMI specs simply don't support 14bit RAW Bayer data.

[reddeercity]

Will to put it in a nut shell, the stream for the HDMI comes form the Jpeg chip
which happen to be yuv422 and being it's jpeg compression that's limited to 8bit
Here a related post that should help to understand better.
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=7443.msg99136#msg99136