Tapani is the IQ guy in J&FF, no doubt about that.
He´s always coming up with new technical solutions for our setup, and a while ago, he installed the socalled Magic Lantern firmware on his Canon EOS 550D DSLR camera. Magic Lantern is a free, open source update which basically makes the camera able to do lots of cool stuff that Canon doesn´t want it to. Like record good audio, show live histograms and zebras, enable live audio monitoring, and many other things.
Tapani wasn´t quite happy with the audio solution they´d come up with, so he decided to give it a shot himself. So after a week or two of serious hacking, he was able to program a bypass around some chips here and there (don´t ask me how they do this stuff, it sounds like true magic to me). And now he has his name in the Magic Lantern “end credits” for doing something that made something better. Impressive! Go Tap!
Anyway, the Magic Lantern update also makes the camera able to shoot timelapses. Tapani did these timelapse tests in Finland some weeks ago. Enjoy (and be sure to check it out on Vimeo if you want the full HD experience)!
Thanks!
But really, it was actually very little that I did for Magic Lantern, and that was on top of the work of the serious guys, (a guy named Alex, being the main guy) behind the ML firmware for 550D.
What I did was just some stuff, that was almost already working, to be able to bybass the auto gain control, and then some very small stuff to bypass the in-camera audio filtering. So really, the credits should go to the other guys seriously putting effort into it.
Well, it still sounds like black magic to me. I can barely turn on the camera.
Is there a switch on button on the camera?
There’s a possibility to set an interval for the automatic shutter release in the Magic Lantern menu, so no real mechanical switch on the button.