So I wonder if it is possible to have a 1080 output for connecting an external recorder?
- Not without hardware mods. You may grab the RAW stream and send in directly to a ssd with a custom grabber. This should be possible, but you will need to know where the RAW stream comes from/it goes to .
Without telling you much bullshit, the cameras RAW stream is, as far as I know, constructed like this.
Sensor => CPU => SD card
The sensor grabs the full RAW stream, the CPU convert the raw Stream in a .mov stream and then it is written to the SD card. The trick to get the RAW feature in magic lantern is, that the display of the camera (please correct me if Iam wrong) is using the full RAW stream to display the image. There, they have grabbed it to write it directly to SD card - genious. As all we know, the 550d is limited to about 21mb/s write speed, so technically the only problem would be the writespeed on SD card.
I had concepts to replace the camera SD card writer with an IDE ssd, but there are still some limitations on the firmware.
I thought about using the USB 2.0 controller to stream 1080p raw to a notebook (USB 2.0 is 480Mbps max. so this should be ok) (well Iam definitly not the first one) But there are also some limitations. The standard grab from the camera to usb goes after the stream is converted by the cpu, so there is technically a little chance to overwrite the CPU stream to USB with the RAW stream, but I had no concept to get this working
Well, there are a lot of more competent people in this community than me. So just my two cents here.