Canon 5D Mark iii HDMI Clean Output?

[Roger Jones]

Biggest disappointment so far is the lack of audio on the HDMI output signal. I'll be that the leaked firmware is the same thing canon will be releasing. No audio on the external recorder makes this feature less useful. I think Canon does care about video users. The c300 and c100 have been a big success. Dumbing down the still camera capabilities keeps them from cannibalizing sales of higher end gear with bigger margins.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

Biggest disappointment so far is the lack of audio on the HDMI output signal. I'll be that the leaked firmware is the same thing canon will be releasing. No audio on the external recorder makes this feature less useful. I think Canon does care about video users. The c300 and c100 have been a big success. Dumbing down the still camera capabilities keeps them from cannibalizing sales of higher end gear with bigger margins.

But but doing that also makes them just one of many and there are many hungry players. Not dumbing it down may have been the way to really get tons of sales. WHo cares about a bit of margin if you get 100x the sales instead? Who knows but it seems like they reacted in their usual conservative way instead of trying to aggressively go after the gold mine they accidentally hit on. Who knows.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

I wonder if the new firmware doesn't actually make things a touch sharper after all, maybe comparing HDMI vs new internal is the same but maybe new internal is sharper than old? Fine edges seem to get mosquito noise sort of, maybe part of making it sharper. I need to shoot with the new, rollback and shoot with the old and compare. Maybe they did sharpen it up a bit? It is a different look than the 'raw' though, less fine micrcontrast still and yet maybe more aliasing than old video or the 'raw' video buffer?

EDIT: the artifacts, fine detail shimmer, aliasing and such seem to be something going wrong in Premiere Pro (h.264, High, 5.1, 40Mbs CBR; USM/sharpen/colorista tools) since both the original Ninja recorded files and ones recorded by the 5D3 with new firmware DO NOT have that weird stuff going on. So whatever that is it is definitely not the fault of the 5D3 and/or new firmware.

EDIT: EDIT: well other than in one file where there is some weird black band that pops on and off across a few letters of white text in a weird way on one file, that is on the original
MORE EDITS: actually that weird stuff is in all the files, slight bumps to cam and almost like a bit of 5D2 line skip sorta aliasing jitter, just without sharpenin git wasn't as easy to spot

 

[psolberg]

this is an excellent article on the ML hacks which although not related to the firmware in question, it does answer why the quality improvements are minor at best.
http://www.eoshd.com/content/10294/3-5k-canon-5d-mark-iii-raw-video-with-magic-lantern-and-latest-updates

apparently the 5DmkIII internal processing before encoding pretty much degrades the image quality while preparing it to exit the camera either via the h264 encoding engine or hdmi. In other words, this dashes all hopes to improve on the soft output via HDMI recording. It's a hardware limitations problem.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

this is an excellent article on the ML hacks which although not related to the firmware in question, it does answer why the quality improvements are minor at best.
http://www.eoshd.com/content/10294/3-5k-canon-5d-mark-iii-raw-video-with-magic-lantern-and-latest-updates

apparently the 5DmkIII internal processing before encoding pretty much degrades the image quality while preparing it to exit the camera either via the h264 encoding engine or hdmi. In other words, this dashes all hopes to improve on the soft output via HDMI recording. It's a hardware limitations problem.

There must be some hook to send stuff over the HDMI since it has to send the degraded stuff out, if one can find the hook and access that directly. Unless there is some direct hardware path to HDMI and to cards from the buffer that is forced into a certain pathway of manipulations that are hard locked and can't be adjusted enough either.

But if that buffer is where even normal images get sent before they get sent to the card then that seems odd since it doesn't debayer CR2 before writing to the card or convert them to jpg or anything.

It's a shame Canon didn't release full pipelines, OS, DIGIC documentation. Sooo mcuh more could be accomplished sooooooooo much more easily. hah.

I'm confused about why he talks about the DNG getting slowly debayered in the buffer and then written to the card and talk of still being in bayer format at 1931x1080 when the sensor is 22MP Bayer and 4:4:4 when Bayer files are not truly 4:4:4. And if it gets slowly debayered before being written to the card why are some claiming the DNG files on card are in bayer format (although it has seemed unlikely to me).

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

I still don't know why they didn't give the 5D3 high quality cropped modes for wildlife and stuff and 2x2 block modes. They had so many years and such a market to conquer and dominate and it seems they got all side tracked in going other ways and maximizing profit margin and internal segmentation and this and that instead, so conservative too.

 

[psolberg]

I still don't know why they didn't give the 5D3 high quality cropped modes for wildlife and stuff and 2x2 block modes. They had so many years and such a market to conquer and dominate and it seems they got all side tracked in going other ways and maximizing profit margin and internal segmentation and this and that instead, so conservative too.

C-line protection. that's all.

 

[florian]

But the C-Line is a total different quality. I have the 5D III and like it a lot and use it on my Tiffen Merlin 2 from time to time. But I got my 1D C this week and I can only say the quality of the movies is something I haven´t got before. I filmed parrots with 600mm II lens and 2x III in 4K and Super 35.
That gives me 1200mm *1,3 crop = 1560mm and I can crop the picture down to 1080P and get about 3120mm focal lenght or with the Super35 mode 1800mm because of 1,5 crop . It´s just perfect. Doesn´t really fit on my Merlin anymore but I don´t regred spending the extra Money. And I have to say the clean output is not really needed, the quality will only get better with RAW. But it´s nice to be able to connect a Ninja and get the Zebra and Focus peaking. and a backup of your recorded image in a good quality.