Magic Lantern 0.1.4 Is Out- Adjustable Gain and Zebras are now in!
 

Hang on to your hats, the Wizard is brewing some more home brew!

Title speaks for itself. I have loaded to my Canon 5D Mark II, and after booting, go to the Picture Style button. There in small print on left center is area. You go up or down and adjust with the toggle.

I will be testing tonight, but this means a lot more to us, depending on what you are using to get sound to your camera....

Go Here :

Magic Lantern Firmware Wiki

Zebra setting appear to be as follow:
 

I am guessing here, but Zebra setting appear to be selectable as follow:

f000------------> 100%
b000------------> 90%
7000------------> 80 %
3000-------------> 70%

Digital Gain
 

Adjustable to 0,6,,12,18,24,30,36

Analog gain is a bit out of order, per Hudson:

MGAIN register values don't quite go in order, sorry:
0 == +0 dB
1 == +20 dB
2 == +26 dB
3 == +32 dB
4 == +10 dB
5 == +17 dB
6 == +23 dB
7 == +29 dB

Here's a quick guide to analog and digital gain.

The best performance will come at A:0, D:0, assuming you have a mic/preamp that has enough signal that is clean.

I found that you can increase the analog gain to +10 without much extra noise. The levels at 17 and above start to junk things up.

With digital, every time you increase the gain by 6dB, you are throwing away one bit. You want as many bits as possible if your signal is clean. If it's dirty, you can throw away bits with abandon.

So, my progression would be something like this...

* A:0, D:0 // Cleanest signal possible - but you need a strong signal input
* A:0, D:6 // I'll probably skip over this
* A:10, D:0 // Still very clean
* A:10, D:6
* A:10, D:12 // The default in Magic Lantern 0.1.3
* A:17, D:12
* A:20, D:12
* A:20, D:18 // This is about as far as I'd push it. It's already pretty noisy here. Might as well add gain in post...

Jon:

I was hoping you would come along with a primer. Thanks a lot for that.

Chris, is that supposed to be a download link for the latest version? If so it's still showing the first release.

Although I am a sound engineer...I am confused by the 'analog/digital' option you refer to.
The 5D2 has an stereo minijack input ...that's obviously an analogue input.
Where is the selection to allow a digital input?

I'm currently recording sep sound on an Edirol R-44, a far better recorder than the H4n and not really much bigger. It works well but I am interested by Tramm's mods to the audio, as even if I just sent a monitor signal to the camera to use the level meter's I would find a use for the Magic Lantern..plus the 'zebra's' would be great of course.

Dave T

As I understand it, the input is always analog, but you can add analog gain (electronic, like turning the gain knob on a preamp) or digital gain (zeros and ones, like using your DAW to increase gain).

The AK4646 that is used in the 5D has an analog pre-amp, a ADC, a digital filter stage and then a digital gain stage. The ALC works by adjusting the digital gain; the Magic Lantern firmware turns off the ALC and allows a fixed gain to be set in the digital stage. The digital gain stage doesn't add any new data, so if you increase the gain it just zero-pads the LSB in the samples. You can do that in post just as well, and keeping the digital gain low on the camera ensures that there is plenty of headroom for hot mics.

Jon's tests found that the 5D's preamp is pretty noisy if turned past +10 dB of gain and that it was much better to use an external preamp like the CX231. Canon defaults to +20 or +29 dB which is one of the reasons the noise levels are so high with the stock firmware.

Sure, that sounds reasonable. Your guess is as good as mine.

The img_vram buffer that is being analyzed for the zebras is a planar YUV with 16-bit luminance samples. I do not know the transfer function that they are using for the conversion, so it is difficult to come up with IRE equivalents. The zebra threshold is solely based on the Y values.

If anyone has a better idea, please let me know!

The link is new firmware 0.1.4 for replace the old one 0.1.3

Yes, but the point I was making is that it leads to the old download option and I can't see any link on the page for firmware 0.1.4.

The wikia site seems to do some pretty aggressive caching between servers for load balancing. Sometimes it takes a while for edits to propagate, especially image thumbnails.

I just tried explicitly purging the cache on the download page. Does the 0.1.4 link show up for you yet?

Thanks Tramm. Just tried again and the 'Downloads' link brings me to this page:

Download firmware - Magic Lantern Firmware Wiki

The download file there is still 0.1.3.zip

Am I missing something, since I'm the only person who seems to have this problem?

Shows as 0.1.4 for me...

It's probably your browser cache that needs flushing or try force reloading the page. If that doesn't work then I have attached the file you want that I just downloaded from the wiki.

Thanks Chris and Nigel.

I had been reloading the page, but I just tried it again right now and, what do you know, it's showing the 0.1.4 file. So I've downloaded it. Appreciated.

double post, please delete.

Magic Lantern 0.1.4 users be aware that if you shut down or let the camera time out in this version while you are in the menu mode, you may not get a complete shut down, and you will have to pop the battery out and reload it.


Also, when camera is shut down, on next reload you are back to defaults. Hopefully, in future version, Tramm will find a way to make your Zebra gain settings stick....

I haven't figured out where it is safe to write things in NVRAM. That's obviously a dangerous place to go scribbling since it might overwrite some other Canon settings.

Another step that I need to try is to open a file on "C:/", which appears to be some sort of in-memory filesystem. If it is also in the NVRAM, perhaps that would be a safe place to store all of our settings.

It would be awesome if, along with the firmware, we could put a configuration file on the CF card that we could load. That would help in multi-camera shoots.

For what it's worth, I have absolutely *no problem* with having to manually set up a specifically called files / folder structure for each CF card that I'm going to put into the camera... in addition to copying ML to each card.

Jon, you come up with some of the best (and simple) ideas. That's perfect.

As I suggested before, with the small file size, one could keep a subfolder of various versions of ML, on each chip, and drag an drop the one with the settings into root before start up. I know with the variables starting to grow, this will get to complicated, but maybe kind of editable string for the user to set up on the CPU system, that automatically writes the wanted values into the version of ML.

Excellent! I'm glad to hear that a config file is doable.

One thing to keep in mind is forward compatibility. As new versions become available, we would want our previous config files to still be valid. And you probably don't want to write version converters, or burden the code with the reading of bunch of completely unique formats/versions. Unless you're designing Microsoft Word, of course. :)

Anyway, design that first config file with great care. You might have to live with it for a long time...

One advantage of being "in beta" is that it is sometimes ok to say "delete the config file and restart"...

I think we'll have a simple text INI style file initially, but ideally we would move to a script based setup. So at startup the Magic Lantern firmware would look for a autoexec.pl (or .py or .scheme or something) to initialize all the parameters. That way the complexity of configuration is moved out of the "hardcoded" C code and into an end-user editable format.

Sounds right to me ! By the way, I think in some situations we will want to turn off zebras, so that option should be there at some point..

Chris I am sorry if it is obvious, but how do I adjust gain and zebra?

Bruce

0.1.4 sources now online
 

For the truly adventurous, fool hardy and other mad men, the Magic Lantern 0.1.4 sources are now posted: Download Magic Lantern sources.

Even more than the pre-built and tested binary firmware images, these sources are potentially dangerous and you can damage your camera. There is no warranty of any kind on this software. There is no support implied. In fact, it is best if you pretend you never read this post and instead look at cute pictures of animals instead.

To build the firmware I'm using arm-elf-gcc 4.3.2 on Mac OS X and arm-linux-gcc 3.4.4 on Linux. Beyond that I can't make any promises of things compiling or working. You must also have mercurial, perl, make, binutils, etc. There is no support for cross compiling from Win32.

Due to copyright issues with Canon's firmware flasher, you must supply your own 1.0.7 firmware image if you want to build the ROM dumper. The only top-level Makefile target of interest is magiclantern.fir.

The sources are GPLed, but any commits to the main tree must be accompanied by copyright assignment.

Good luck and be careful.

Bruce go to top of this thread. Read down from there. Essentially, once you are up and running with Magic Lantern 0.1.4, press the Picture Style button, you will see an overlay with lines of code on right, but to the left is a small overlay with a pointer. Use toggle on back of camera to move up and down, and depress toggle to change the setting. Approximate setting are discussed throughout the thread here. Remember this is early stuff so GUI is very bare bones.

Not only are you a wizard hacker, but a jolly funny fellow too.

-- peer

OK...no more 5D stuff for me. Im hanging around the cute animals from now one. :-)

When will ML support 1.1.0?

It actually only works with 1.10, Mark. He is referring to intitial development of Magic Lantern early code which is still apart of Magic Lantern