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Canon T2I - Filming directly to solid state instead of SD card, is it possible?


Sean DelGatto

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Ok, the big question I have is:

 

1. Can the Canon T2i possibly, as it currently is, or with a software hack, capture footage and store it to an external hard drive?

2. If it can do this, is it possible for it to film in RAW?

 

I'm not super excited about having to fall back to shooting on Digital, but my Film camera is being converted to ULTRA 16, and it won't be ready in time. So, I'm going to try to squeeze the best out of this little devil as possible.

 

Thank you for your time and input.

 

Sean

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You might want to look on the Magic Lantern site. They do have hacks for different Canon cameras and some allow for recording raw internally. There is a forum:

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?board=49.

 

The raw recording is pre-conversion to RGB but post pixel-binning so it's 1080P raw as far as I can tell. I don't think it can be sent to an external drive as raw since that would have to travel down an HDMI cable. And the T2i might not be one of the cameras where the hack allows for raw, you'd have to look deeper on their site.

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One post that summed up the raw capabilities wrote this:

 

"550D with mk11174's "ML_Mem_All_Fix2" build gives 896x512/23.976fps (video mode) or 24.000fps (photo mode) as maximum continuous shooting resolution with 16x9 aspect ratio. For widescreen, this build will also shoot 1216x416/23.976fps continuously. I had Hacked Mode on the whole time, but not sure if this has any effect at all."

 

So not even 1080P.

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Personally I find it slightly ridiculous that these tiny little consumer cameras can be made to do it at all.

 

Either way, if one is to be forced to shoot on a t2i/550D, shooting Magic Lantern raw does provide very significant improvements. I wouldn't normally cite a YouTube video as an arbiter of critical image quality, but this one does have some fairly illustrative side-by-side stuff comparing with the onboard compressed recording.

 

 

As is very clear, if you can stand the Cinemascope-esque aspect ratio, the raw is gigantically superior.

 

P

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The HDMI output on older Canon DSLRs is not generally worth recording. It tends to have a lot of overlays which you can't get rid of, and sometimes odd scaling.

 

Raw motion picture recording is available on some cameras via the Magic Lantern third-party firmware.

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