Magic Lantern...things to beware of?

G

grantw

Well-known member
So I had a shoot last week and f'cked up the whole thing. I had the bitrate set to .01x which I didn't even realize so I gotta go back and reshoot it. I had another card with ML and it kept stop recording, so I threw a different card in which I had been fooling around with the night before and I guess I changed the bitrate value. So didn't realize it keeps all the same settings for each card, which makes sense thinking about it.

Anyway. I'm kinda nervous about shooting with it now and am gonna test the crap out of it. But I'm wondering if there are other things that people have encountered that I should watch out for? Is bitrate the only setting there that will pretty much totally change the image quality, is there another I should look out for?

I love the control you can have, but sometimes it stops recording, or the camera shuts off/freezes weird, or other things that make me feel like its not 100% stable and makes me nervous.
 
I love ML, even though I've never used the manual audio gain or the bitrate options (which I always leave at default)
 
I love it, but I too ran into similar issues early on shooting test footage. I now go to great lengths to make sure all SD cards have the exact same ML settings when I install newer versions so that I do not run into issues during card changes, only using the same 8 or so custom settings each time.
 
What you need to check depends on you and what you shoot. To be honest, I've never touched the bitrate settings outside of one time when it was first available to tweak. Came to the conclusion that it doesn't make much difference, and never touched it again since. So I never bother checking that.
What I DO check each time, however, is the audio settings, and custom white balance. Because those change with every shoot.

I shoot with multiple cameras, and have used dual T2i's more than once. Using magic lantern isn't any more complicated than checking any other setting in camera (both using the same picture profile, etc). There's nothing in particular that you'd need to check in ML outside of settings you may have been experimenting with.

As far as stability- you always introduce more points to go wrong with anything like this, but I also won't shoot on a Canon without it (and even wish it was compatible with the GH2 at times!).
 
I ran into a problem two days ago. My camera would not turn on at all. I tried restarting several times and nothing happened. I then tried without a memory card and it somewhat turned on. Then put it back and tried again, and nothing. So, the card was the problem.
I checked out the card on the computer and everything was wiped out. Luckily my stuff was saved but everything including ML was gone. So, I had to format it all so it started working again.
 
I had one problem last weekend when using it. Don't know what did I touch, the screen showing some crop marks of even wider screen. It happened in the middle of a wedding shot. I was freaking out. Then I swap out a new card with ML and it goes back to normal.
 
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