Nikon DSLR gets hacked to add Raw video, but only at 1.5fps
posted Tuesday, July 2, 2013 at 12:22 PM EDT
Earlier this year, the Magic Lantern firmware hack brought Raw video to some Canon DSLRs, and it looks like Nikon cameras might have something similar hiding away in their midst, too. A new release of a Nikon toolkit shows that the D7100 is capable of outputting its Live View as Raw.
Vitaliy Kiselev is best known for his cinema hacks for Panasonic cameras, but also has been working on tools for Nikon, too. In his most recent update to NTools, he notes:
"D7100 has fun string present in firmware
A:\LvRawd.raw
If someone do not understand, it means LiveView Raw."
Another hacker, Simeon Pilgrim was able to use some firmware tweaking to capture Raw video at 1.5fps from his Nikon D7000. We're still a long, long way from this being usable Raw footage out of a D7100, though. Pilgrim noted on his blog post about the footage that:
"Turns out that after some data review, the files contents appear to be the left over ram from taking previous pictures and not the current raw buffer. sigh. Well at least we now how a button, that is wired up to run in live view and a complete understanding of the file handling process, albeit a slow process."
Neither of these announcements on their own are enough to get a Nikon DSLR shooting Raw video like the recent Canon developments, but they do give us an incremental step towards that end goal. Give it a little while and some more tweaks, and we might yet be able to.
(via Phoblographer, EOSHD, Planet5D)