From the course: Video Gear

Magic Lantern menus: Part 1

From the course: Video Gear

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Magic Lantern menus: Part 1

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- So, Rich, as we jump into showing off the menu system here with the Magic Lantern firmware, I do want to make one important note. If you're having problems loading Magic Lantern on your camera, just make sure that you actually have the latest and greatest supported Canon firmware for your camera. I've had problems in the past with cameras trying to load Magic Lantern and it freezes and it won't update. The guys at the development team base the Magic Lantern firmware off of the Canon firmware. So you have to have a certain level or a certain number of firmware for things to load up. But that's easy, just head over to the Canon website, download the latest firmware, and you should be good. - Yeah, and you can always find details of that combination on the Magic Lantern website. Alright, so let's bring up those menus. Look at this beautiful signal here. This is what I've always wanted. We've got VU meters, we got storage capacity remaining, we got a live histogram there, all sorts of detail. - Yeah, and right now we're showing this with overlays but of course if I press Info a couple times I can toggle between different modes and different settings and all that kind of stuff, and go completely overlay free and you can configure those overlays in the Preferences as well. - Alright, well let's dig into the menus and see some of those options, but I just had to gush that this is pretty awesome. - It's pretty cool, so I'm gonna press the trash can icon on the back of the camera, and that is going to bring up my Magic Lantern menus here. You'll notice they look kind of similar to the built-in menus, but they have kind of their own little look and we have information about them and the thing I really like is you'll notice at the bottom kind of where our audio meters are right now, it does actually show me information about the menu item which is nice, because instead of having to consult the actual manual, you can actually get a little overview. So let's just step through these real quick as sort of an overview. - We've got the ability to set a test tones, if you want to adjust an external recorder and set levels and then we can actually change the file format, right? - Absolutely. So under Sound Recorder here I can record to waves, I can create new clips, I can do all sorts of things, which is nice. Next menu over besides Audio I'm gonna have my Exposure menu. This is kind of cool because we can do WhiteBalance, ISO, all the things that you're used to doing, but now we have detailed Kelvin setup. So if I actually go into WhiteBalance here and use my WhiteBalance control, I can actually adjust individual Kelvin values which is really nice for getting fine-tune WhiteBalance. - Yeah, and I have this option on some of my cameras, but it's nice to see that here, that you really have that fine level of control, and you really see what's going on. - And again, as you go over these menu items you'll notice at the bottom of the menu system, it's explaining what it does and how to enable it or disable it once you're actually shooting, which is, again, a great little cheat-sheet for how to use the firmware. Next we have the Overlay menu, and this is where we're gonna do things like configure Zebra, Focus Peaking, which is great for helping you focus, - Yeah, let's turn that on and show that option. - Sure. So if I turn on Focus Peaking, here we go, and once I have that on, if I go back, you'll notice that as I focus here, see how I kind of get that sort of noise on the image? Well that's actually my Focus Peaking in action, letting me know right there on the microphones as they're red, - It nailed it. - that that's indeed in focus. And that's huge for video recording where you might be using manual lenses, things of that nature, that you're not gonna have any autofocus capabilities on the camera, and this just gives you confidence, because after all we've discussed this in previous episodes, everything - The LCD lies. - and everything looks good on small monitors, so this is kind of a confidence check as well. Now there are other Overlay options in here including the ability to do False color, which is nice. We can actually bring up a Waveform and Vectorscope down here, so perfect for when you want to go ahead and view brightness information as well as color information. And again, if I go back to see things, you'll see that I have a Vectorscope pulled up so I can see my overall hues, my overall saturation in the image, as well as my overall exposure with the Waveform, and of course I have a traditional Histogram up there as well. - And I'd like to go on the record that the colorist on the set did have proper white balance, so that was good, notice he tweaked the white balance, everything lined up. - Well this is awesome, because now you don't have to really depend on a third party monitoring solution for things like Waveform and a Histogram and all that kind of stuff; you have it built in. Now a lot of the magic of this firmware, pardon the pun, happens over on the next tab over, and that's gonna be the Movie tab. Now the cool thing about the Movie tab is that we have a lot of control here for doing things that we could never even think about doing on the built-in firmware. First, we can actually do HDR video. Now what's HDR video? - Well you're gonna get a high-dynamic range, and that's pretty cool, because what it's gonna go through is make sure that it's recording a RAW file, and that it's better suited to capture the highlights and the lows within the image. But keep in mind this is a lot of data, these are big files. - Right, and it also does it kind of in a unique way, it adjusts the ISO of the camera between frames, not overall exposure with aperture or shutter speed, that kind of thing. So you will get some flickering while you're recording, that's normal, but it's just an interesting thing to do on a camera because HDR is gonna give you a little bit more dynamic range in the image. The other thing that we have down here is Image Finetuning. So if I go into this menu, this is where I can control things like my Black Level, I can control the Digital ISO, so my sensitivity, things of that nature. Essentially exposure compensation, so if you need to pull the sensitivity, the sensor down. Let's say you wanted that shallow depth of field, you were opened all the way up, you've used up your ND filters, and you can't just get it, this allows you to basically desensitize the sensor, or boost the sensor a little bit more. But the big takeaway here is the RAW video option, which is really quite cool, but these files are huge! - Yeah, and also don't expect these to play back on the camera. These are gonna record in a .RAW file that you're gonna need to be able to view on your computer with software that's gonna support RAW video as well. - And the next tab is gonna give us a few more options on actually shooting. Now the key here is do you want some additional controls? I'm a big time lapse fan, I love having an Intervalometer. - And this is actually a really good point because the camera, obviously everybody thinks of Magic Lantern for video, but we have things that you would traditionally do with still photography, things like an Intervalometer for doing time lapses, doing different bracket modes, all sorts of things, silent shooting, that kind of stuff. - The Bulb Timer really comes in handy if you're shooting, say, things like a Milky Way, and you want to do a really long exposure, it's gonna come in handy. We've kind of covered the front half of the menus here, which is the shooting controls. When we come back we're gonna explore some of the other things that you could do to really configure the camera, as well as a couple of troubleshooting steps you might need to be aware of.

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