Any Magic Lantern firmware or similar for Nikon ?

<p>My friend showed off his real estate video by Canon DSLR with Magic Lantern firmware. It really balance the lighting exposure between outdoor and indoor. I'm Nikon fans for years or don't have any Canon DSLR. Just wondering why Magic Lantern doesn't work on Nikon DSLR or there is something more advance for Nikon that I missed ? </p>

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<p>Any Magic Lantern firmware or similar for Nikon ?</p>

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<p>No, guess nobody boddered to disassemble the Nikon Solid ware and rebuild an updated version of it...</p>

<p>Very belatedly (Christmas holidays!), Magic Lantern is very specific to Canon hardware. There is a "NikonHacker" project, although the way the Nikon firmware works appears to make it somewhat harder to make changes, and I believe they're nothing like as advanced as Magic Lantern at this stage (though I've not been following closely) - Nikon certainly don't seem to be going out of their way to make this easier.<br />

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Specifically talking about balancing lighting between indoor and outdoor, are you talking about a flat profile for video? Magic Lantern support features such as dual amplification for those Canon bodies with two amplifiers, which helps to compensate for the relatively low dynamic range of Canon sensors; the Nikon sensors are almost ISO-less anyway, so that specific hack should not be necessary. The Expeed 4 cameras do have a video mode with a flattened dynamic range, although I don't believe it's quite as friendly to retrospective grading as the modes offered by Panasonic or Sony - would that help your requirements?</p>

<p>Thank you Andrew for your info. <br>

To make it simple, all Nikon DSLR with HD video mode are unlikely to produce lighting balance video to deal with extreme bright and dark situation, am I correct ?<br>

Without changing to C-camp, anything I can do to improve this situation with my Nikon(s) ? </p>

<p>Hi there. I can't claim to be an expert in shooting video (with anything!) However... I assume "lighting balance video to deal with extreme bright and dark situation" means capturing a large dynamic range in a single video image. Normally, Nikon sensors are good at this, but the large dynamic range is thrown away to some extent by the video compression, so you don't get the kind of flexibility that Blackmagic offer.<br />

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What you can do on some cameras, I believe, is select the "flat" picture control mode. I believe that's an Expeed 4 feature - present on the D810 but not D800 - although you could presumably generate this manually. You won't get the control that's possible with a still image (you can't use Active D-Lighting or Clarity), but you'll record a wider dynamic range in the video. I assume, although I've not tried it, that you would get the same via the HDMI output, if you were using an external recorder to record uncompressed video. Sadly, I think you only get 8-bit output, but at least you can squash the dynamic range a bit. Applying some dynamic grading to the output would then allow you to get back some detail without clipping - although you <i>may</i> get banding. "Flat" picture mode isn't much use for still images (if you're going to post-process, you should probably be shooting raw - although confusingly Nikon's blurb suggests using it for raw shooting), but it's probably what you want for video, in the absence of some more complex encoding like Sony's S-Log curves or BlackMagic's raw video. Nikons aren't really video specialists.<br />

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I can't off the top of my head give you a guaranteed list of cameras that support this, but if it's an Expeed 4 feature then I'd expect the D810 (definitely), D4s, D750 and - as a new thing - the D5500 to have it. You may be able to get a similar effect with a custom picture control on another camera - what are you shooting?<br />

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Good luck, and I hope that helps (or if I'm confused and it's completely misleading, I hope someone corrects me!)</p>