It disables AGC and provides manual gain controls for your microphone.It shows an audio level meter so you can see how loud your input itIt provides headphone monitoringAdds zebra stripes so you can visually see clippingAdds the ability to use rack focus. Using ML you can avoid this by setting manual levels. This can be avoided by doing an audio count-in for each recording. When you first start, you will hear the sound go really loud and distort, then settle in. This results in a very noisy signal with distortion. It samples the audio level and automatically adjusts for it. Why the bad audio? AGC sets the volume of the input based on the sound the microphone hears. When you restart the camera, it goes back to normal. Bottom line, it doesn’t overwrite your cameras firmware. You install it onto a CF card and then run it when you need to shoot video. Magic Lantern doesn’t replace the firmware on your camera. Let’s examine how it works and a plain english installation walk through. I have found a great workarouns by using the free Magic Lantern firmware hack. The footage is H.264 so it does show some minor artifacting and the lack of decent focusing controls. The audio sucks really bad because of Canon’s AGC Auto Gain Control in the audio. You will also have noticed some drawbacks. With the nice shallow depth of field you are now able to capture something that resembles a cinema camera, or at least a high-end video camera worth $100,000 or so. The fact that you can use the DSLR lenses ads a film-like quality to your video. You are able to shoot at full-frame 1080p.

The first thing is the outstanding quality of the video. If you’re like me and have used the Canon 5D mk 2 for video, you will have noticed a few things.

Magic lantern canon 5d mark ii raw size