Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I now hold the belief that any Canon camera that does not have Magic Lantern installed is broken. I use it on my 5DmkII, and it's an entirely different camera. I love the features that ML brings to me for shooting stills (I don't shoot video on my DSLR). An internal intervalometer is worth its weight in gold. The ETTR ability is also priceless for chasing sunsets/rises. For how I use my mkII, the only thing that I have that's nit picky about ML is that it can't handle intervals less than 5 seconds. When it comes to requiring shorter intervals, I do pull out a wired intervalometer, but that's rare.

One thing that I'd love to figure out is how to have ML control the timelapse, but have the camera signal to an external motion controller. Usually, the motion controllers want to control the camera so everything is in sync. However, as ETTR increases the shutter time chasing a sunset, the motion controller needs to know to delay the move. I have built devices connected to the shutter release port waiting for the voltages to change, but that didn't work. Was hoping that the voltage would drop when triggered internally, but it seems the port isn't wired way. Almost like they might have an opto-isolator on the port or some other method to protect the port but it doesn't allow the voltage to drop when triggered by the camera itself.

I'd expand that to "Canon is broken."

This company has needed a management house-cleaning for at least a decade. They're just wandering in the weeds at this point. Does no one there actually pursue filmmaking or photography? It's unreal.

I mean... there's no excuse for any digital camera, especially one made in the last decade, not to have an intervalometer. It's essentially FREE to implement.

But then, Canon's the company that was still pushing interlaced video well into the 2000s and launched the SLR video revolution... with a camera that could shoot 25 and 30 but not 24 FPS.

Exactly none of Sony’s latest full frame mirrorless cameras have a built in intervalometer, and there is no way to install one. So it’s not just Canon.

Cascable Pro works okay for me IMO, even though it is indeed a third party solution.

You'll be happy to know that it's supposed to come in the April firmware update, though.

>But then, Canon's the company that was still pushing interlaced video well into the 2000s and launched the SLR video revolution... with a camera that could shoot 25 and 30 but not 24 FPS.

It wasn't just Canon. There were still a lot of tape based cameras. Non tape based formats were still expensive (P2s etc). It wasn't until the 4K spec came out that interlacing was finally dropped. You have to remember that waaaay back in 1996 when HD first started broadcasting, the signal was still analog and flat panels were not common at all. HD CRTs were a thing, and required interlacing. Just like color TV had to remain backwards compatible with B&W, they chose to make HD backwards compatible with SD.

One myth/legend says a Canon engineer not in the DSLR department realized the ability of the camera's chip, and mentioned that he could make it record MP4 video sort of as a fluke. It wasn't something they set out to do. It worked, so they rolled it out. I don't know the validity of that story, but it sounds like Canon didn't expect the feature to be that popular. As all v1 products, somethings just weren't there like 24fps. I can't remember if any video cameras at that time were full framed sensors. I'm thinking 2/3" or 1" sensors were the norm. The shallow depth of field that the full frame sensor brought to the ~$2500 market is what did it, as well as a readily available large selection of lenses. No more ENG look for video without shooting film.

they have an intervalometer. Its embedded in the over $100 dollar remote they sell. I've borrowed and used one, its terrible, though it does work. [1]

They do have wifi on some models, but the ap and linking isn't trivial. I haven't bought a camera in years, but they were also selling GPS ad ons where everyone else was integrating it into their cameras.

I have a 5DmkII and the quiet mode and image quality are quite astounding when shooting indoors. (I'm a community orchestra's photographer)

[1]"https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Canon+T...

For synchronizing motion, you can use the camera's hot shoe. It will be closed during the exposure and open once it's complete.

> you can use the camera's hot shoe

Or even better the PC Sync port - it's quite a simple plug, easy to get one and connect to the camera, the hot shoe is a bit fiddly to connect to (unless you have a spare shoe and are willing to modify it). Also setting flash sync to the second curtain will close the circuit just before the exposure ends instead of when it starts, which may be beneficial for interval calculations with long exposures.

I've tried the flash port with rear curtain syncing, but still didn't do what I needed it to do. Mainly, I had difficulty with the timing of the signal. It's not like the shutter release where there's voltage and then there's not. It's an obvious thing to test for. The flash was just a quick blip. Maybe it was the low cost meter that I have, but when the flash triggered, it barely even registered on my meter.

A (cheapish) multimeter is going to be too slow to catch the signal from a flash shoe, however any cheap microcontroller or electric circuit should catch the signal with ease.

So, any suggestion on what the voltage from that port would be. That was my hang up. Since the multimeter wouldn't register, I was just guessing. I started at 5v similar to the shutter release, but never could get a reading from it to register on my Arduino.

There's no voltage. Maybe your meter could register drop in resistance (from ~∞ to ~0). Think of it as simple push button. Or, to put it differently, you need to supply your own voltage and it will flow for a moment when the camera triggers the flash (closes the circuit), and you can register the spike.

Edit: the circuit is insulated from the camera electronics since some flash lights can send 250V or even more trough the PC socket - it acts as the pathway for the charge from capacitors to the bulb (in some, esp. older strobes).

Yes, it should be a short blip. It's just closing the circuit for a brief moment to allow the discharge of power from a capacitor into the bulb. Hard to detect by a meter, but should be easy to pick up by an Arduino or something like that, maybe even a simple circuit.

Can confirm this works on 5d3. Picked it up with Raspberry Pi GPIO.

The ETTR ability is also priceless for chasing sunsets/rises. >>> Do you mind explaining how you use this?

First, you have to enable the 'ettr' module. Once enabled, select the Expo->AutoETTR setting. For timelapse chasing sunsets/rises, I set it to Always ON so that it will determine what to do on each frame. For sunsets, I also set the 'Slowest shutter' setting to what works in that environment (city scapes ~2secs, dark sky locations ~20-30secs). The concept is trying to push your exposure to the limits of the digital sensor. This enables the shadows to receive extra exposure while counting on the fact that you can recover a certain amount of highlight that would normally look over exposed. In fact, if you shoot JPEG images, it will be over exposed. Only shoot RAW. ML evaluates the exposure of the current frame, and then looks to see if it needs to adjust it up/down. As the scene gets brighter, it will speed up the shutter speed. As the scene gets darker, it slows down the shutter speed. If the 'Slowest shutter' speed is reached, ML will then try bumping up the ISO to keep the exposure the same. My mkII stops at 1600.

ETTR is an acronym for 'expose to the right'. It's fine for sunsets. But are portraits trickier because the sensor's gamma curve is optmized for skintones falling within a certain IRE range? I come from the world of Arri and Red where this is a thing - but perhaps the high dynamic range of stills makes this a non-issue.

I've had this conversation with portrait guys that think I'm crazy for pushing the exposure that hard. Granted, I don't shoot a lot of timelapse with models ;-) I do know that pulling skin tones back out of shots that were 'accidentally' over exposed was tough/near impossible. As with all things, each camera has its unique qualities/abilities. Whenever I talk ETTR with people, I always suggest testing the limits of each camera body and the ability in post to recover the highlights. Test, test, test, and then know those limits so you can get the max ability from each piece of gear.

The crazy thing is that I come from a video engineering background, and image acquisition with just a histogram is still foreign to me. Give me a good waveform for exposure and vector scope for color, and I'm much more confident about the image. I want my camera cart to look like a DIT station!

Yeah, I mean I think it would be such a minimal difference in recovered highlights with a raw image where you've ETTR. I think testing the sensor limits is a great philosophy, but also letting go and focusing on the 'artistic' subtleties over the technical subtleties of an image becomes more important.

Would be interesting to a/b your ETTR and 'correctly' exposed images to your friends without letting them know.

Sensor response is pretty much linear. That's why you want to shoot in RAW which gets you file without a tone function applied. Whereas with JPEG, it's not only applying a tone function but a contrast function as well which aggressively tosses highlight and shadow detail.

reflex cameras are broken lol

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