Tramm Hudson has been hard at work as there is now a Magic Lantern firmware hack for the baby brother of the Canon Video DSLR line.

He has given it the following features:

GUI menus: press the ERASE button to display them

Bit rate control (QScale parameter) for the H.264 encoder

Zebra stripes for overexposed / underexposed areas

Spotmeter, histogram

Cropmarks (16:9, Cinemascope, Fisheye)

Simple intervalometer

Trap Focus: camera takes a picture when something comes in focus

Wireless trigger with the LCD face sensor & your own hand

AE bracketing (like on 5D2 ML)

Rack focus

Stack focus (Live View only)

Lens data computation

Onscreen audio meters

Manual audio gain, selectable input source, disable AGC and digital filters

Display time remaining during video recording

Debug functions (display CMOS temperature, screenshot, logging)

WARNING: This is not pre-Alpha software and COULD damage your camera and invalidate your warranty. If you choose to do it, it is at your own risk.

Tramm is working on a 60D version and is getting there, I have not seen any news of a 7D version yet.

The install instructions are here: http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/550d_install

Magic Lantern 550d Update, December 12th from Renny Hayes on Vimeo.

Some notes from Alex, regarding bugs and usage:

– Autofocus in intervalometer: in Full Auto mode, it does autofocus,

but in A or M it does not (at least on my camera). Tou may also switch

the lens to MF.

– Zebra overwriting Canon menus: should be fixed in latest pre-

release, but this slowed down a bit the drawing routines.

– GlobalDraw: turns off zebras, cropmarks, spotmeter & audio meters

with a single click.

– Live View bug is still not fixed, sorry.

– Save Config is also safe to use (and you will usually want to use

it).

In fact, from the debug menu, the only potentially dangerous is

draw_event (it is sometimes unstable on my camera). Not sure about the

items in the Boot menu… Powersave should be safe as long as you

don’t forget your camera on 😀

http://groups.google.com/group/ml-devel

Magic Lantern – 550D/T2i port from Trammell Hudson on Vimeo.

Initial port of the Magic Lantern firmware to the Canon 550D / T2i camera. This version only adds on-screen audio meters, but shows that it is possible to add the film making features that users need.

http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/550D