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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Hacking it!

A

AlexJones

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Hey everyone!

I wanted to know if you know about any hacks for the Scarlet? The 5D has magic lantern. Do we have anything that could give us more frame rates at high res or anything?
 
Bob Gundu said:
The best hackers for the RED cameras are... the RED team! Seriously, if there is a way to squeeze more out of the camera it would come from RED.
Click to expand...

I have no doubt this is the truth and would never want to hack mine.
But...Im still waiting for the two freaking fps missing for 50p in 3k.

The only mod i heard of is Les that I think took out the olpf and running some special suace in post.
 
ML for canon is great. But it's mainly necessary because Canon cripples their firmwares, mostly avoids further development after a camera has hit the market and doesn't listen to their customers. All those things work differently with RED.

And honestly, while i don't have a big problem using ML on a Canon DSLR i wouldn't want to void warranty and sacrifice stability on a RED with a hacked firmware.
 
Alex,Trammel,Georg,Indy,Andrew don't have a RED AFAIK.

Some of the this group were interested in Accessing hidden features, others in developing new feature sets.

My only ML skill that might have made it EPIC way would have been to see if my code low level code optimisations skills could have helped OpenCL CPU hogging wavelet code - a task that is seems is no longer required.

If Project Denver gets some 20nm joy - And leveraging its HW grunt has a practical use, I might don a coding hat once more ... but never in the RED OS.

AJ - http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/2.0.4_AJ
 
Bob Gundu said:
The best hackers for the RED cameras are... the RED team! Seriously, if there is a way to squeeze more out of the camera it would come from RED.
Click to expand...

Have to disagree, the guys at Magic Lantern are more than capable of doing that, only they haven't done that yet because they are going to get in legal troubles with Red..
 
i wouldn't recommend hacking the camera and i definitely wouldn't recommend opening your mouth about it on a public, real name forum. red releases updates when they're ready, just like the magic lantern 'team'... if you're doing work that needs an alpha build, you'll already be in contact with the right people... who are already working at red hq.
 
I hear ya Paul. But man how cool would it be to "unlock" a Red Scarlet to get the full frame rate of a epic.
Or to have all the information displayed on the Red branded EVF's and LCD's be displayed on 3rd party monitors.
Whats the harm in at least the latter. Modding and Hacking has brought out the best in mobile phones, Cameras,
game systems, heck even cars! With the proper precautions being meet kinda like bolting a super charger on a already
bad to the bone dodge viper u would increase oil flow, re do the cooling system, tweak the fuel pressure etc. now not only
is that Viper bad to the bone ... it's bad to the bone marrow (sorry ran out of slick analogies haha). Just my 1 cent. Heck I would love to be able to use a traditional SSD in my red one @ at least 2k like I do with my BMC.
I know most SSD's can't handle the write rates of 4K although there getting pretty darn close.
It looks like I have the proper connections in there oh well Red Mags it is .................FOR NOW! ha.
 
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Leroy Jackson said:
I hear ya Paul. But man how cool would it be to "unlock" a Red Scarlet to get the full frame rate of a epic.
Or to have all the information displayed on the Red branded EVF's and LCD's be displayed on 3rd party monitors.
Whats the harm in at least the latter. Modding and Hacking has brought out the best in mobile phones, Cameras,
game systems, heck even cars! With the proper precautions being meet kinda like bolting a super charger on a already
bad to the bone dodge viper u would increase oil flow, re do the cooling system, tweak the fuel pressure etc. now not only
is that Viper bad to the bone ... it's bad to the bone marrow (sorry ran out of slick analogies haha). Just my 1 cent. Heck I would love to be able to use a traditional SSD in my red one @ at least 2k like I do with my BMC.
I know most SSD's can't handle the write rates of 4K although there getting pretty darn close.
It looks like I have the proper connections in there oh well Red Mags it is .................FOR NOW! ha.
Click to expand...

BTW, info displayed on external monitors has always been possible.
 
Leroy Jackson said:
Heck I would love to be able to use a traditional SSD in my red one @ at least 2k like I do with my BMC.
I know most SSD's can't handle the write rates of 4K although there getting pretty darn close.
Click to expand...
Funny story - the BMC writes as much data at 2.5K as the Epic does at 5K 4:1. So for my shoots, my BMC actually shoots more data than when I shoot Epic (usually 5K 5:1).

EDIT: That said, a lot of people have been having problems with dropped frames and such on the BMC. BMD maintains a whitelist of SSDs on their site, but many of those are discontinued, some are on different firmware now that doesn't work as well, and some still just don't really work all the time. Some SSDs not on the list work fine, and other new SSDs that work on paper don't hold up in practice. Luckily I've never had any issues with my SSDs, but it is a real-world problem of using consumer SSDs. RED has bypassed that problem, offering bulletproof SSDs, though at a cost.
 
The ultimate hack would be to get a version of Epic firmware working on a Scarlet... then you could see which resolutions/framerates actually crashed (or fried) the hardware. Not gonna try it with mine! Even if I knew how to program for AISCs... But it would put a lot of questions about what the Scarlet could do to rest.
 
There's a fundamental difference between Canon and Red:

Canon almost never updates the software for their cameras. This provides a platform that is fairly static, and creates a lot of room for people to play around with getting additional features out of the same set of hardware. There's a hole, so to speak, in that the company that makes the camera isn't doing it.

Red, by comparison, has made my camera MORE VALUABLE just by updating software about 5 times in the time that I've owned it. There is an ever-changing and improving feature-set for the same exact hardware that I have, for free. It creates less of a mindset for a "hacking the most out of the hardware that's there because no one else is doing it". There's already someone doing it: Red.

You may not feel that they're giving you all they can, but you'd be flat out wrong to have the opinion that they're giving you less than some of the other camera companies out there.
 
paulherrin said:
i wouldn't recommend hacking the camera and i definitely wouldn't recommend opening your mouth about it on a public, real name forum. red releases updates when they're ready, just like the magic lantern 'team'... if you're doing work that needs an alpha build, you'll already be in contact with the right people... who are already working at red hq.
Click to expand...

He, he, just for the record, I have nothing to do with Magic Lantern, I just made the comment because I know that those guys can hack almost anything, but that is up to them. (freedom of speech anyway).
 
My Hack would be to contact my wonderful Rep. and set up my trade in for $9,500 for an Epic. That is my hack. If someone is needing me to shoot higher frame rates, then they can pay for me to rent an Epic.
 
When the development of the scarlet / epic firmware declines and the cameras are high in numbers and come a lower prices. So low so you do not really care about warranties and such. Then I'm sure there will be hacks available, no doubt about that.

How ever I think the scarlet are as RED say, "faulty epics" sold for half the price in gray casing.

Think of it, now RED are about to sell dragons, the "faulty slow epic dragons" will be sold as scarlet dragons, So far RED only has estimates for how many epic dragons they will actually sell. When they made and sold a few they see the trend and they also know at what ratio they get scarlets dragons out instead of epic dragons. Then they can value that and set the price for scarlet dragon... Thats at least how I would slice it if I was red.

So I actually believe that scarlets are epics that did not live up to spec for 5K on the production line. If there was a hack for making them do so, I think red would do if and sell them for more.

However it sucks that RED does not let the scarlet do 50p instead of 48p kind of ruins it for the european market.

Shooting with boot epic and scarlet today. Underwater shoot down in Sodowana / SA. Got everything from dolphins, big wales, fantastic reefs and sadly also a storm this after noon. Both cameras are working great even though the epic overheated a few times due to the build of the housing.
 
Nick Pasquariello said:
There's a fundamental difference between Canon and Red:

Canon almost never updates the software for their cameras. This provides a platform that is fairly static, and creates a lot of room for people to play around with getting additional features out of the same set of hardware. There's a hole, so to speak, in that the company that makes the camera isn't doing it.

Red, by comparison, has made my camera MORE VALUABLE just by updating software about 5 times in the time that I've owned it. There is an ever-changing and improving feature-set for the same exact hardware that I have, for free. It creates less of a mindset for a "hacking the most out of the hardware that's there because no one else is doing it". There's already someone doing it: Red.

You may not feel that they're giving you all they can, but you'd be flat out wrong to have the opinion that they're giving you less than some of the other camera companies out there.
Click to expand...



+1 .
 
There is a fundamental difference between Canon and RED.

Canon turns the blind eye on ML.

RED on the other hand are very protective of their intellectual property and does not, and maybe never will allow such mods.

And that's the end of it.
 
ERIC PECK said:
There is a fundamental difference between Canon and RED.

Canon turns the blind eye on ML.

RED on the other hand are very protective of their intellectual property and does not, and maybe never will allow such mods.

And that's the end of it.
Click to expand...

I don't know that there *is* legal recourse. There certainly is if Magic Lantern tried to make a profit off the software. At that point, if ML used any of Canon's software in theirs, then that's copywrite infringement.

However, installing Magic Lantern on your 5D isn't illegal. But it does invalidate the warranty. And for good reason: sloppy, unsanctioned software could cause hardware issues (unregulated overheating CPU is an easy example that comes to mind). If Canon were to introduce such a bug, then that's on them, and under warranty it's covered. If you install your own software, well, you're on your own.

Another example: Apple iPhone jailbreaks. Having worked in an Apple Store, I can tell you: if it was jailbroken, it was no longer under warranty. But the act of jailbreaking isn't illegal. It breaks the contract you have with the company in so far as your device is no longer under that contract, and thus Applecare no longer applies. But there is no legal recourse to take against the people that create or install Jailbreaking software. They buy a device, they can do with it as they please, so long as they are not making a profit. One of my best friends is cousins with Comex; I actually met the kid right before he went to intern at Apple. If you're not familiar with the story: 19 year old Kid jailbreaks iPhone; said jailbreak becomes dominant method for jailbreaking all (then) current iDevices; Apple offers kid paid internship to help them root out such bugs in their own software.

Kid wasn't prosecuted. No one got sued. No one got arrested. Because that's not how this stuff works. The only profit Comex got from the jailbreak, was from the Apple internship that resulted from it.

If you were to install custom software onto a Red camera, you won't go to jail. But you also will have zero support network if something goes wrong. And if your camera gets bricked or burnt or whatever, well, you just lost any and all money you sunk into that camera body.

Bjorn has a good point: when Scarlets get cheap enough versus common enough (probably cheaper than the current 5D MKII) that might be when such custom builds start to show up. That being said, I'm staying the hell away.
 
Sharing any public information on reverse engineered code in the EU can leave you in hot water (even bugs you find in their code!).

Canon also made it clear they would take ML to court if we empowered the firmware on their higher end cameras.

RED actually supports their platform and welcome suggestions (no matter how hair brained they are).

AJ

Jannard said:
Better... :-)


Jim
Click to expand...
 
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