Hello all,
I was finally able to borrow a 5D3 for testing the latest very exciting 1x3 recording developments but only for a very short time - I have to return it tomorrow. Nonetheless, I thought, it might help if I provide some feedback on what I was able to test in that short time.
I tested briefly the two 17fps options in Danne's build:
https://bitbucket.org/Dannephoto/magic-lantern/downloads/crop_rec_4k_mlv_snd_isogain_1x3_5D3113_presets-ver2.zipand all I can say is that this is another break through for Magic Lantern. I would have never dreamed of shooting at 400/3200 Dual ISO at 1,0 crop factor and get usable results. Not only are they usable and quite clean, but also look very natural compared to previous techniques for improving dynamic range which in most cases provided very HDR-ish looking images. In my opinion, this 1x3 technique, in combination with Dual ISO, provides a radical solution to low-light shooting high-quality FHD video in RAW without or with very little noise in the shadows. I don't think, too many of the professional cinema cameras can do that. Congratulations to all of you making this possible!
Also, I greatly appreciate Danne's efforts to provide continuous recording options, even at the expense of reduced frame rate. There is nothing more annoying than early camera stops in the middle of a shooting. And I don't think that 17 fps is that much of a problem. Human eye accepts everything above 12 fps as motion and earlier silent movies were shot at 16 fps. I shot a wedding film recently that I filmed at 18 fps and nobody noticed that. Nowadays we also have quite good optical flow techniques. Of course, if you do a lot of camera motion, (slider, gimbal, flycam work, etc., requiring fast camera motion) you may end up with some choppy results but there is a solution to that too. Motion should be slower for 17 fps, compared to 24 fps, and as smooth as possible, so training is required. If you shoot from a tripod, monopod or even handheld and do not shake the camera too much, results are indistinguishable from 24 fps and the motion blur of moving objects in the scene really looks nice. So, 17 fps is not necessarily a bad thing!
I didn't have time to test all the options, especially the 10/12-bit ones at different ISOs in the crop menu - this requires a lot of time and very systematic efforts to pixel peep all combinations and select the ones that provide the cleanest results with the highest dynamic range. I hope that other 5D3 owners will jump in with more test results very soon which will be of great help to the developers. However, I did test some of the high-resolution crop modes (I use them all the time, especially with the 100D) and am sorry to say that they are all broken in the above build. The 3k crop mode that I have been successfully using to film the wedding at 3072x1728 resolution and 18 fps does not seem to be working at all. It does not allow me to set any resolution but stays all the time at 0x0. The 4k and Full-resolution Live View modes seem to be kind of working but the results are horrible - a lot of aliasing along horizontal and vertical edges, noise and loss of resolution - both, in the normal and Dual ISO modes. Camera operation in those modes is very unstable either - lots of camera freezes requiring battery pulls. These high-res crop modes used to work very well even in the very early builds from April 2017.
At this time I would make the following suggestion to A1ex and the other developers: Please try to implement working 17 fps presets from Danne's build above into one of the experimental 5D3 builds. Please use the July 4-th build #78 that you can find here:
https://builds.magiclantern.fm/jenkins/view/Experiments/job/crop_rec_4k/The later ones, including the July 22-nd build, do not seem to be working properly - lots of instabilities. Once such an experimental build works properly and is stable enough, I am sure many professional 5D3 video shooters will start working with it and will greatly appreciate it. This is because they will have a very powerful tool in their hands that they will use for a long time in their work. This is the dream of every video shooter, including me. I would like to see a build that can provide the following modes:
1) Normal 1,0 crop factor FHD (1920x1080) RAW video with maximum quality and minimum noise that can be used in low-light conditions with Dual ISO. The 17 fps presets already do that;
2) 3x-crop FHD (1920x1080) RAW video (1:1 mode) that will allow me to quickly change the focal length of my lens from 1 to 3x on a push of a button without changing lenses or using heavy zooms. A 35/F2 IS lens is perfect for that and I use it all the time switching from 35 to 105mm focal length.
3) A 3k mode that I can use at 3072x1728 resolution and 18 fps for continuous recording (also with Dual ISO). This one is perfect for capturing scenes with a lot of fine detail (group shots with 50 or more people on them, landscape videography, etc.). Here is a film of the ancient city of Plovdiv that I made recently and that was filmed in that mode with the #78 build:
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/Grpx/iLK4KHaKi(To watch it in the highest quality, please download it with the "Скачать" button from the top left of the above link).
4) A Full-resolution Live View mode with up to 5 fps continuous recording for smooth timelapses.
5) The usual 50/60 fps modes
For the beginning, 14-bit lossless compression would be perfect but wherever 13, 12 or 10 bit lossless could be implemented, would be very welcome to reduce file size.
And one final thought. Now that we have all the above functions more or less working and ready to use and we are close to the ultimate quality ML RAW video, in my opinion, future research should be directed towards increasing the interface bandwidth for higher frame rates and/or higher continuous recording resolutions. This can be done in two ways:
A. Reimplementing card spanning on the 5D3. I don't know why this extremely useful function was removed;
B. CF-card overclocking in a way similar to SD-card overclocking on the 100D - a God sent function.
It also would be very useful to create similar builds for other camera models such as the 100D, 7D, 650D and others. The 5D3 is still quite expensive and the majority of ML users, including me, use the other camera models. We all would love to see a long time awaited update to our cameras too in a way similar to what Bilal did with the 700D already.
Please let me know what you think about my suggestions.
