University of Toronto student produces real-time HDR video with 60D

[marcb]

Don't know if this has been posted already but a student from the University of Toronto has managed to produce real time HDR Video with a 60D, Magic Lantern and an off-the-shelf video processing board with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) .
Check this out: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/hdr-video-real-time

First RAW and now HDR... impressive stuff. The Canon DSLRs are starting to look more like REDs every day...

Is the ML development team involved in the HDR hack?

[hirethestache]

He didn't develop the edge detection/raw focus assist, that is part of ML.

[marcb]

Wonder if HDR raw capture is possible directly to a fast CF...
I don't really understand how he got the HDR stream in Live View.
It almost looks to me like he's using that board to remote control magic lantern functions on the camera via USB.
Someone got any ideas on how his set-up works?

[guy01]

It almost looks to me like he's using that board to remote control magic lantern functions on the camera via USB.
Someone got any ideas on how his set-up works?

I would assume the board is simply doing regular post processing that would be done on ml hdr video live.... although he has 3 exposures vs 2... so I'm not sure.

[eatbuckshot]

Wonder if HDR raw capture is possible directly to a fast CF...
I don't really understand how he got the HDR stream in Live View.
It almost looks to me like he's using that board to remote control magic lantern functions on the camera via USB.
Someone got any ideas on how his set-up works?

Computer engineer here,
I've recently worked on digilent FPGA boards, and what you see is real time image processing being done on the 60d' video output.  (FPGA's is a chip that allows you to reconfigure it to do different things, almost like you're programming a CPU)  FPGA's are good because they can run very fast in their configuration since it's all physical. He said that it stores the different exposed frames in a buffer and processes them for HDR and outputs it to the monitor.
(the fpga is acting as an image processing device inbetween the camera and the monitor)

I'm not sure if he's remote controlling it perse, but it isn't necessary... It seems it's just the regular ML hdr video mode (maybe he modified some ML code to just activate it when not recording)