Magic Lantern wiki

Model Capabilities

Workstations

Editing raw video has become easier recently with more software coming out that can handle it, but you still need some horsepower in your workstation. Adobe CC seems to do most of its work with the CPU & RAM and ideally you want at least a quadcore and 32 GB. DIY workstations

Davinci Resolve makes more use of your GPU and renders quicker than CC in my experience, so if you use Resolve more, it makes sense to spend your money on better GPU's as Resolve will make use of as many as you can install. dual GPU in Premiere Pro

USB 3.0 is a lot faster at transferring than 2.0, so make sure you have that for dumping your footage.

SSD is preferable to HDD for a few reasons, raw speed being one and consistent speed regardless of free space another, but they are expensive and different configurations of HDD's can work well. Realistically you need 4 more drives either all in a raid configuration or two in raid and two to handle previews, renders, scratch and projects. If your project is heavy on the photos/audio, you will see a slight performance boost from storing those files on a different drive to your video files.

Buy a quality PSU that can easily handle your needs (at least 750W). Make sure it has the right connections for your components.

You are going to need a cooling system of some kind for your CPU and a heatsink with fans is pretty much foolproof, but a lot of high end users have water cooling. Corsair H systems are great and work straight out of the box, but custom systems are not that hard to install and you can run your GPU through them too. At this point you have a lot of heat being generated and the biggest case you can get is going to help you, but even then you need to keep all the cables tidy and arrange your fans to expel warm air from the top and draw cold air from the bottom. I'm thinking about getting rid of my case and modifying a cabinet I have so I can install my system in that with soundproofing and high powered fans. This will make installing extra drives easier which is a regular occurence when shooting raw.

Conversion Software

Raw video needs to be converted to a sequence of digital negatives before you can edit it. Here is a list of current ways to do this.

FFMPEG now officially supports Magic Lantern Video , which means that “a library that is widely used by a number of programs that do video will have native support for MLV. Which means any of the programs that use that library will defacto have support for MLV. Which means that you will be able to playback MLV files with any of these already existing programs. Almost all open source video applications use this library (called ffmpeg).”

Editing Software

Colour Correction software

Things to do

Samples for testing

Simple coding tasks

Black level feedback

Workflows

Workflows are job specific, constantly changing, inconsistent across the different platforms and a reflection of your 'technique', but there are some principles we all adhere to:

Set up your camera. Shoot. Prepare for edit. Edit. Output.

Setting up your cam with ML can be daunting at first, there must be 100 new options for you to worry about, so in the first place you should switch all of them off. A lot of the features you may never use depending on the nature of your work, but it pays to understand them all. Some features affect other features in unexpected ways such as exact fps disabling sound, but to my knowledge ML is pretty stable and a lot of time is spent on making sure it won't fry your camera.

Shooting with your Canon is made easier by ML's ability to customize your camera for your job. Things like auto exposure, 14 bit video, cropmarks etc all go a long way to improving your production and you can program ML to show only the settings you use to help you navigate your menus under pressure.

Once you have your material in the can you then need to prepare for edit and if you are shooting raw video you are going to spend a lot of time doing this. Both raw and mlv require converting to an image format your NLE can work with, although there are plugins for importing raw to Premiere. Adobe Camera Raw seems to be the favourite colour corrector for most people, Davinci Resolve is my choice for creating proxies, Premiere for editing and either back to Resolve or Camera Raw via a dynamic link to After Effects. I've got a hex core CPU and 3GB GPU on Windows 7 and Resolve seems to be the fastest at rendering, whilst After Effects gives more post production options.

Installing ML

RAW video & ML -- Beginners Guide, FAQ & Useful Links -- READ FIRST

how to shoot RAW on a canon DSLR

Prefs - LV display presets - Do you know how cool this is?

How are you processing your Raw footage?

RAW Video Post processing (raw2dng) [Mac/Win/Linux]

RAW Video: PostProcessing -- Beginners Guide --

3 Good Workflows for 5D RAW footage

None destructive raw workflow for Premiere using After Effects and Dynamic Link

Preventing Color/Luma Shifting When Processing DNGs in Adobe Camera RAW

Banding issues

Applying corrections to a frame other than the first in Adobe camera raw in AE