I am trying to come back to Magic Lantern raw video but I am now so confused.

[york824]

Used to own an EOS M as well as a 5DII, before all the crop builds so I only had tried 720P or sub-1080P recording.

I sold them some years back and switched to a Panasonic S5. It's been a great still camera and has created a lot of beautiful memories of my family. But I have always been struggling with the video recording with it. Sometimes it produces beautiful 4K footage but other times it just failed to capture the colors I wanted. Also the footage is quite difficult to grade in Davinci Resolve as I can do very limited grading.

So I am considering buying a 5DIII for raw videos. It is insanely inexpensive now in the used market. But in the past days I have been doing some research and I am very confused:

1. If I want to record 1080P raw videos with no crops, which build should I go for?
The official builds are very much dead regarding development so I think I should go for the Danne's crop_rec_4k, but the thread has basically no information at all. What kind of framerate options do I have assuming I have a fast enough CF card? I should be getting stable 24 (23.976) and 30 (29.97) right? Is it possible to go beyond them? Like 48 or even 60 FPS?

2. Regarding the 5.7K mode. I saw a lot of YouTube videos discussing this and the footage are all so beautiful. It requires both a CF and a fast SD card so I assume that I need to get both cards installed for it to work right? In this situation does the camera store the still images in the SD card or the CF card? Also, do I get the live view when recording 5.7K video? If I want a 16:9 footage at higher than 1080P mode without a massive crop, is it possible with this build?

3. For 5.7K video to work, I need a fast enough SD card and a SD overclock with ML. How reliable is the overclock? I live in a city where the summer can get very hot, over 35 degrees Celsius. So I am wondering whether my SD card is going to be cooked when I record for a long time.

I know it's a lot of questions, so if you can point me to a link with more detailed explanations about the Danne's crop_rec_4k build I would be extremely happy. Thank you for your time.

[yourboylloyd]

1. I only have a 5D2 (which I love), so I can't help much as far as experience. But Danne's build is the one that I think most people use on this site. But 1080p at 10bit RAW should be more than capable of hitting high frame rates with the overclocking the sd cards can do. You can probably even do it on CF cards.

[a.sintes]

In terms of 5D3 ML builds for doing raw videos, the most up-to-date is currently this one which is basically Danne's build with some additional features, like the ultrafast framed preview for crop modes (and anamorphic).

Then:

1. no matter if cropped or not, Danne's build is the best one for any raw-videos purposes on the 5D3, feature-wise.
In terms of frame rate you can get stable 23.976/24fps with almost all modes (even hi-res), 30 with some and 60fps is possible in 1080p (raw) like in this video:

(warning: both 4K and 120fps outputs here are due to upscaling/frame interpolation in post)

2. 5.7K mode is misleading (and a little bit oversold/trendy imho, compared to 3.5/4K modes) as it's a so-called "anamorphic" preset, meaning in fact a video resolution of 1920x2340 that you will have to desqueeze 3 times horizontally in post to get 5760x2340 (yes, it means a huge loss in quality), the advantage being the usage of the whole full-frame sensor (where other modes are cropped).
It means also that it may not necessarily requires card spanning technique (SD+CF recording) depending of the record bitrate (resolution+framerate+bitdepth), so maybe a CF alone is enough or even maybe a SD supporting overclocking (please refer to this up-to-date known compatiblity list)

Actually card spanning and overclocking are required only if you want to shoot very-high resolutions videos like 3.5K or 4K continuously, which is working pretty well.

Card spanning will alternate writes on both CF & SD to avoid write buffers saturation, meaning in the end you will get multiple chunks of video scattered on the two cards that you will have to join in post using MLVApp or MLVFS (quite transparent).

"live view" (the realtime/hardware-based one) is only available when dealing with native camera resolutions, any crop mode/anamorphic relying then over a quite slow software-based preview, which is at least properly framed in most of the case.
My specific build (with ultrafast preview) speed up things but it's not perfect (please check this video:

) and far from hardware-based achievements like in Bilal's crop mood build for EOS-M.

3. overclock is very reliable if compatible, I'm living in the south of France where the summer is HOT and I never get any overheat issue on the 5D3 even when spending a whole shooting day using it with 3.5K mode, card spanning and overclock quite intensely :-)

Hope it'll help!

[york824]

In terms of 5D3 ML builds for doing raw videos, the most up-to-date is currently this one which is basically Danne's build with some additional features, like the ultrafast framed preview for crop modes (and anamorphic).

Then:

1. no matter if cropped or not, Danne's build is the best one for any raw-videos purposes on the 5D3, feature-wise.
In terms of frame rate you can get stable 23.976/24fps with almost all modes (even hi-res), 30 with some and 60fps is possible in 1080p (raw) like in this video:

(warning: both 4K and 120fps outputs here are due to upscaling/frame interpolation in post)

2. 5.7K mode is misleading (and a little bit oversold/trendy imho, compared to 3.5/4K modes) as it's a so-called "anamorphic" preset, meaning in fact a video resolution of 1920x2340 that you will have to desqueeze 3 times horizontally in post to get 5760x2340 (yes, it means a huge loss in quality), the advantage being the usage of the whole full-frame sensor (where other modes are cropped).
It means also that it may not necessarily requires card spanning technique (SD+CF recording) depending of the record bitrate (resolution+framerate+bitdepth), so maybe a CF alone is enough or even maybe a SD supporting overclocking (please refer to this up-to-date known compatiblity list)

Actually card spanning and overclocking are required only if you want to shoot very-high resolutions videos like 3.5K or 4K continuously, which is working pretty well.

Card spanning will alternate writes on both CF & SD to avoid write buffers saturation, meaning in the end you will get multiple chunks of video scattered on the two cards that you will have to join in post using MLVApp or MLVFS (quite transparent).

"live view" (the realtime/hardware-based one) is only available when dealing with native camera resolutions, any crop mode/anamorphic relying then over a quite slow software-based preview, which is at least properly framed in most of the case.
My specific build (with ultrafast preview) speed up things but it's not perfect (please check this video:

) and far from hardware-based achievements like in Bilal's crop mood build for EOS-M.

3. overclock is very reliable if compatible, I'm living in the south of France where the summer is HOT and I never get any overheat issue on the 5D3 even when spending a whole shooting day using it with 3.5K mode, card spanning and overclock quite intensely :-)

Hope it'll help!

Wow that's a lot of valuable information! Thank you sooooo much!!!

Regarding the 60fps mode, I noticed it is slightly lower than 1080P but the image looks beautiful anyway. Is it a cropped image though? How many seconds can I record at 60fps mode?

[a.sintes]

mmm don't remember if it's cropped but I think its' not, I'm not sure... as I remember 1280@60fps is just a specific preset requiring first to switch to 1080p@30 in Canon menus.

To answer your last question, you always need to apply the following write speed (MB/s) rule of thumb:
( width x height x bit_depth x frame_rate x compression_rate ) / bit_to_MB_conversion
where lossless compression rate is variable depending of light conditions, but you can assume it will be 60% in the worst case.

So if dealing with a 1920x1280 12bits image at 60fps you'll get:
( 1920 * 1280 * 12 * 60 * 0.6 ) / ( 1024 * 1024 * 8 ) = 126.5625 MBps

Generally, a good CF card got a record speed of ~90MB/s, which is enough in most of the cases, but here you can see that you'll have to deal with card spanning and potentially SD overclocking depending of the SD write speed to get proper continuous recording.

Keep also in mind the maximum possible speed of the 5D3 (hardware limitation) is around ~148 MB/s (card spanning + SD overclocking) even with two SD+CF cards reaching ~90MB/s each.

[york824]

mmm don't remember if it's cropped but I think its' not, I'm not sure... as I remember 1280@60fps is just a specific preset requiring first to switch to 1080p@30 in Canon menus.

To answer your last question, you always need to apply the following write speed (MB/s) rule of thumb:
( width x height x bit_depth x frame_rate x compression_rate ) / bit_to_MB_conversion
where lossless compression rate is variable depending of light conditions, but you can assume it will be 60% in the worst case.

So if dealing with a 1920x1280 12bits image at 60fps you'll get:
( 1920 * 1280 * 12 * 60 * 0.6 ) / ( 1024 * 1024 * 8 ) = 126.5625 MBps

Generally, a good CF card got a record speed of ~90MB/s, which is enough in most of the cases, but here you can see that you'll have to deal with card spanning and potentially SD overclocking depending of the SD write speed to get proper continuous recording.

Keep also in mind the maximum possible speed of the 5D3 (hardware limitation) is around ~148 MB/s (card spanning + SD overclocking) even with two SD+CF cards reaching ~90MB/s each.

That's great! Thank you again. I am excited to my new old camera this weekend.