Great news for Canon 7D users who feel left out of the Magic Lantern raw party, it would appear that the buffers for raw data on the 7D have now been found! This brings the 7D much closer to a working raw workflow

Till now 7D users have looked on sadly as it seemed like every Canon EOS camera but their own got magic lantern raw capability, even the Canon 50D, a camera that didn’t even shoot video in the first place. The 7D has had to wait however, because it has a very different architecture to the other cameras in the Canon EOS lineup. Apparently this is on account of its dual digic IV processors which were a radical change from the usual single digic processor setup. Hopefully though, once the key bits of hardware have been reverse engineered, the main code should be re-usable and things should start moving quickly to a fully working build for the 7D.

The camera takes compact flash cards and is expected to be capable of doing 1728 x 1156 resolution going by what has been possible on other cameras so far. How it works out in practice we will have to see.

Early days

It’s very early days for the 7D yet, as the code still needs to be made to work, so I can’t show you much video, but while I was writing this article, the first 6 seconds of footage generated from a 7D in raw just went live:

(Video after pagebreak)

This is a good start but obviously people will be keen to shoot more footage than 6 seconds! I'm sure it's just a matter of time though. In the mean time, check out the following links to see what has been achieved before with Magic Lantern raw on other cameras:

Click here to see my "raw video round-up" with lots of videos.

Click here to see some of the most beautiful video shot with magic Lantern raw.