(I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this,so if not, my apologies!)
I was thinking about trading in my t2i for a 50d to take advantage of the raw capabilities. If I wanted to film a long project, would a hacked 50d work better than what I've got? I've been researching specs but I'm still a bit fuzzy on how stable this thing is.
I have both the 50d and T2i right now and I'll have to say for the most part it depends on what you'd like to do for your "long project"
Currently I'd say the 50d ML is pretty stable for now and I hadn't had issues recording for long periods of time. Granted, it's still experimental in a way, but for the purposes of your situation let's just say it's perfectly stable.
With that said, you'll be getting into a lot more required post processing and setup when it comes to recording raw.
- External Mic and recording device (if you need sound that is)
- 1000x minimum speed CF card (64GB for about 15 min of 1584x896 res footage at 24p, ) (or slower if you're only shooting a few second clips)
- Ample amounts of hard drive space, preferably ssds for storage and transcoding
- fast cpu and lots of ram for video editing and stuff (typically that is)
- transcoding every clip
- learn to conform and grade
Also there's only a max of 1584x896 res (though upscaled to 1080p seems pretty good people say) or 1080p24 in 5x zoom
With raw you do get a minor increase in sharpness and resolution(though moire and aliasing might crop up easily, where special care needs to be taken) (or a good amount in 1080p crop), a lot in dynamic range (for grading), but you do need to know how to use it
If this is going to be a feature length film, just 1 hour would require at least 512 GB of space, and if it's a short film... well that's somewhere along the lines of footage you'd record and cut from... That is just all the raw data... Still needs to be extracted into DNGs or turned into some intermediary codec...
Anyway it'll require a LOT of work, so if you aren't familiar with the workflow or have the necessary hardware for it.. it'll be a pain..
I shoot a lot of events which are hours in length and I find that the T2i h264 at 1080p or 720p is more than sufficient since I don't need to do grading and it just gets cut together for youtube uploading. I got the 50d and a komputerbay 1000x 64gb for $650 (i paid like 100-200 more than necessary) because I want to learn about the capabilities, raw workflow, and possible further developments with ML since I am a comp eng.
If you're technically able to find grading footage shot in h264 limiting and restricting, then it's a good consideration to make, else it might be better to stick with the T2i instead of swapping it for the 50d
