Magic Lantern Raw allows the operator to set a capture window aspect ratio, for example, of 4:3. One of the major benefits for shooting anamorphic lenses with Magic Lantern is the capability of setting a custom recording window from the camera sensor. The Magic Lantern movie settings menu Why does this matter for anamorphic shooting? The power Magic Lantern unlocks in your camera cannot be understated. You can see some comparisons with the video below and these recording capabilities have made us hold onto our 2008 5D Mark II even today. In 2013, the Magic Lantern team unlocked the ability to capture the full 14-bit raw output of the sensor, improving the image incredibly over the original h.264 codec. Most minor issues are solved by rebooting the camera, and have mostly been eliminated in the latest builds. We used it in our Canon 5D Mark II since 2011 on commercials, music videos, and corporate productions and had zero major bugs.

A group of programmers started to study Canon’s code around 2009 and they quickly achieved some improvements over the original firmware. Magic Lantern itself is extremely powerful for enabling zebras, focus peaking, custom crop marks, and many other tweaks that otherwise are non-existent in the stock Canon firmware. Canon 5D Mark II with Magic Lantern, 135mm f/4 USSR Prime Lens and our custom single focus anamorphic lens.įrom our early experience Magic Lantern was pretty much a sort of hack, even though it’s more more appropriate to call it add-on software that can run on most Canon cameras.

Magic lantern canon 5d mark ii raw size