Finally, after about 75 minutes of streaming, it stopped autofocusing completely. I used it for a live streamed gig last night, and it worked beautifully for about the first 45 minutes… then the shutter cycled (no idea why), and when it came back after about a second, there were some weird letterboxing artefacts around the video frame. It allows me to switch off all the overlays and focus grids to get a clean HDMI signal out of the EOS 700D - and with a 50mm f1.8 lens, it looks fantastic. Magic Lantern actually worked really well for me. But hey, nobody ever found fortune and glory by following the terms and conditions, right?
Now, this is some seriously gnarly stuff - if you’re not happy downloading binaries from a website and then running them through the firmware upgrade routine on your DSLR camera, then it is probably not for you, and it is absolutely possible to brick your camera by fooling around with this kind of thing. a video stream with no overlays, menus, focus grids, or anything.īut, it turns out there’s an open source firmware upgrade for Canon DSLR cameras called Magic Lantern. Out of the box, it doesn’t work at all - there’s no way to produce what’s called “clean HDMI” - i.e. Well, turns out my beloved Canon EOS 700D doesn’t quite work as a webcam. I’ve been trying to pick up one of these for a while, but they’ve been out of stock everywhere since March, so instead I managed to track down an Elgato Game Capture HD60 S, which does kinda the same thing. If you’ve read Scott Hanselman’s post from August last year about remote working, you’ll know that the best webcams aren’t actually webcams at all - they’re proper cameras, running through some kind of HDMI > USB converter like the Elgato Camlink. And, with the whole lockdown thing going on, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking for ways to use gear I already own to produce better live streams and studio recordings. I love Canon DSLR cameras my main DSLR at the moment is an EOS 700D (which is sold as the Rebel T5i outside the UK, for reasons I will never, ever understand), which for me hits the perfect sweet spot between affordability and quality. Using Canon DSLR Cameras as Webcams Posted by Dylan Beattie on