[Tiago Ribeiro]

Ran: check this out.

https://www.vfxwizard.com/grimoire/dslr-canon-hdmi-capture-and-focusing-rectangle.html

I knew it had something to do with the focusing mode (I wasn’t sure if it was about auto/manual or something else).

“Set the focusing mode to face detection! In face detection mode, the rectangle does not appear and you can capture an image that’s even cleaner than the one output by the 7D.”

This guide is for the 7D because its date is prior to T3i’s launch.
However, I think that in T3i you can follow the same trick to get the focus rectangle out of the way 🙂
Try changing the autofocus modes to confirm it.

[Tiago Ribeiro]

You are correct, HDMI will not provide FullHD, but it might be close enough so that you will be willing to lose a bit of screen resolution in turn of bit depth:
https://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/HDMI_Output
Here you have the info.
So you can get 1620×1080 with 3:2 pixel ration out of HDMI.
Fair enough as a cheap way to get uncompressed 10 bit 🙂
There are also some demo videos.
Remember that the problem of the demo videos is that when they show you the uncompressed output from hdmi you still see some compression due to the online streaming codecs.
Anyway, you can see that it is cleaner. I’m just not really sure how clean it really is when you capture it.

[Tiago Ribeiro]

Hi Vic,

Just want to add my cents as a pro-am that is always thinking budget versus quality.

I also love doing post. I don’t shoot pictures in anything but RAW and I just love to get home and sit in front of Lightroom getting all my pictures perfect.

I also love to shoot video, but I find that same problem with H.264.

So I will leave you with two things to check out on yourself:

I use MagicLantern, with adds tons of features to your T3i, and although it is free, I contributed to them because it totally changed my T3i into a camera that is worth at least $1000 more. The guys that develop it totally deserve the money.
One of the features it has is the ability to change the compression ration on the codec, which can yield you a cleaner video (although you won’t get rid of the 4:2:0). It also has other really cool features such as zebras, focus peaks and all sorts of things you expect to find in a pro video camera.
Remember to read the warnings – although I haven’t ran into serious problems, it IS a kind of a custom firmware, and may in some situation cause damage to your camera.

Second thing is something I would love to use but haven’t been able to afford:
The Ninja Atomos.
This is an external capture device that feeds on the HDMI port in the camera to save ProRes uncompressed 10bit video straight out.
I haven’t tried it, so I can’t tell you how great it works. It was recommended on a workshop I was in about Cinema with DSLR, and I’ve read all about in online.
But if you are a post/compositing guy and are willing to invest in that, than you should check it out.
Maybe you can rent it first and give it a try.
Personally, if I were making some money out of filming with my T3i I would definitely invest in it 🙂
You should, of course, make sure about the software that will be able to handle the ProRes codec, and also, if your computer will handle editing the uncompressed 10bit stream. It might become kind of RAM-edacious.

[Tiago Ribeiro]

Have you tried i with Magic Lantern (ML)?
For some reason I can’t get EOS Utility to run right now with a ML-enabled card, so I couldn’t test it.
Recently I upgraded both the firmware on my t3i, the MagicLantern firmware, and my OSX to Mountain Lion, so I’m not sure which one made this fail 🙂

But with ML you can clear the whole screen, including the focus rectangle. I’m just not sure if you still get it projected while pairing ML with EOS Utility.

If you try it, please let me know how it went!
Cheers

Ps.: Now that I’m actually thinking about it, I don’t recall having that problem when I did my live stream. Not sure if I had installed ML by then. But try some stuff around the live preview window in EOS Util.
Also, try things like setting the lens to manual focus and things like that.
I’m pretty sure I eventually got rid of that rectangle.

Pps.: Looks like EOS Utility actually still does not support Mountain Lion, so I can’t event test this with a card without ML.

[Tiago Ribeiro]

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for your info!
Actually I think you got my idea wrong.
I wasn’t worried about filming for several hours.
I was feeding the live event to an online stream over the internet.
So I wasn’t worried for example about HD, because my trick (capturing the EOSUtility LiveView screen) already gave me a low res. Also, my computer wouldn’t handle the capture and encoding of 1080p in realtime, if I could event get that feed from the camera to the computer =)

So summing up, things didn’t go that great, because I was too tight on time to do some reasonable tests (I actually did the event right after my post, but only now I’m replying..)

However, I did find out that my setting works!
It just has to be tuned, and there are several things to watch out for.

So I remind that the camera WASN’T RECORDING, but only feeding a live view to EOS utility.

The thing that mostly destroyed my stream was something that I only realized later, after doing some tests.
My EOSLive feed would crash after several minutes of streaming, and I thought it was the camera failing.
However, I tested later, and I was able to have the live view feed on for several hours with no problem..
What I found out was that on the event I used an USB extention cord that was not USB 2.0 compliant! And that was what regularly crashed my feed.
So if you want to do a live stream using a DSLR, make sure you have a good USB cable connecting the camera to the computer.

The second thind that didn’t go that OK was that I streamed out 3 streams from Flash Media Server: one high quality, one mid quality, and one low quality.
Wrong, if you’re streaming with a 13” MBP, it’s no super computer.
Because it didn’t handle all that realtime encoding, my resulting feed was skipping, like if you were watching an underbuffered stream.

I also only realized that later, after watching the recorded stream, and doing some performance tests on FMS.

But overall, as long as you
a) Have a good USB 2.0 extension!
b) Don’t need an HD stream, but only get that live stream out to the world
c) Are able to get a decent settings on the stream compression on your computer

Then you will be able to stream out a live event using a 600D and a laptop.
You may eventually encounter one or another crash, but it’s manageable.

For software I recommend CamTwist (free).
With it you can select the portion of the EOS Utility Live View window, and use it as a video input device.
It also lets you switch for example to a playlist of videos (promos/sponsors, etc) during breaks, and can also let you overlay text on the screen.
It’s actually a pretty useful tool.

For getting the sound in from the sound mixing LineIn+Sunflower works pretty good.

So summing, it’s not a pro solution, but as a free one (as long as you already own a camera), it’s enough!

[Tiago Ribeiro]

I would recommend you check out this guide about location sound.
When it was posted, I read the article, and I think it serves you as a good guide for understanding what you need or should do.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/99/860889

[Tiago Ribeiro]

that’s funny, i had that problem, but with a camera very much lower end than that one. is was with an sx20 is.
i filmed a concert, very dark and low key atmosphere. i remember some shots where i saw and focused something on the lcd, but then on my computer all i see is dark. it seemed as if during compression or saving, i had lost bright (and detail of things working around in the dark)
but i just thought “oh well, this is a consumer level camera, so of course you’re going to loose something”. now if you say that also happens with 5D, then i surely point my eyes against canon =)
in my case all i could do was try to work it out in post.
but again, i was working with a lower end camera, so i can’t expect things to bee all that nice.

[Tiago Ribeiro]

I must say i became interested in your question, and fully understand the dillema. LCD screens seem to be just great for small sized mattes, i guess.

When i was a kid i shot a little stop-motion using a 15″ CRT computer monitor as a green screen =)
i guess that’s exactly what u mean, well.. with a “little” more resources =)
More recently I also tried an LCD 21″ computer screen for doing matte with a bunch of tiny figure toys, but the biggest problem i encountered was that i couldn’t find any color suitable for all of them, so i just gave up.
If course in my case it was just for playing around. CRTs are small and had round reflective screens which wasn’t that good, so LCDs, and especially a big one, are somewhat better.

But the main issue, from what i remember from my experiences, is that light was casted from the screen onto the objects, and because the objects were plastic-based, they reflected a lot of the screen light, which caused faded edges and other kind of artifacts thay you may imagine. Anyway, i guess that this could be attenuated by correctly adjusting luminosity, so you don’t get it too bright, so i guess it will also greatly depend, of course, on the materials of your objects: if you’re used to green-screeing, you should know that reflective objects will be troubling.

Anyway, you’ll never know without giving it a try. I would even like to propose you to try it out, and then report back on what problems you encountered, and what ways you found to fix them, because i guess that will become interesting for a lot of people to know.

Good lock on that,

Tiago Ribeiro

[Tiago Ribeiro]

cellphone cameras have small crappy lenses, so they are really weak with light, so you should try altering that
a night shot will get really blurred, because the lens is small, so it will nead a higher shutter speed (like 1 sec).. general photos get kind of blurred or out of focus, so you could alto try playing with that, and because light conditions are weak within these cameras, you generally don’t get fine colors or contrast
then most of these cameras will have some post-processing applied to try to correct lens’ faults and porr quality, so this post-processing will most likely add gain/brightness, contrast and maybe some saturation to try to vivify the photos…

if i were you i would try to push down the photo to what i think the camera would capture (dark, blurred, poor-colors), apply the noise and stuff (because the camera will capture that), and on top of this, give the contrast, the saturation, the light gain, etc.. doing this will help to mimic what happens inside a cellphone camera, as some color values will get altered, and this way you will also get the post-processing applied over the noise.

note that before the post, the noise should not look like cell-camera noise. it should be a more raw noise, only after the constrasting and saturating will it look like cell-camera-noise..

i’m actually not quite sure what those cameras do about post-processing, but you can also try to investigate that out.

[Tiago Ribeiro]

glad it worked and turned out all right =)
i was afraid my suggestion would sound a bit far-fetched, but it was exactly what i would have done in that situation
all of us have used forums to search for help, so it’s an awarding feeling to help other too whenever we are able..
so just feel free to keep on posting your questions =)