Magic Lantern for Canon 60D FW 1.0.9

Looks like the Magic Lantern firmware hack for the Canon 60D has been posted for Firmware version 1.0.9 here

This is an alpha version (really early software, before even beta) of the software hack, hope they can move it along as the Canon 60D really needs some of its features like:

• on screen audio meters during recording
• ability to have both external and internal mics recording to separate channels
• focus peaking
• manual audio control while recording
• zebra stripes for exposure
• cropmarks
• intervalometer

Hope they can make it happen. I might have to give the alpha a go.

UPDATE 4/20/11

Loaded Magic Lantern for 60D firmware 1.0.9 and although I could get all the nice features up on the screen I ran into two problems:

1. I can’t get the firmware to autoboot yet. I can update the firmware and all the menus work but if the camera is switched-off then I have to update again which I’m not going to do. Instructions warn, “DO NOT repeat the firmware upgrade step with magiclantern.fir! There may be a firmware update counter like on the 7D, and you may end up with a bricked camera.”
2. Can’t get the record button to work. Yeah, this is kind of essential if you want to record video but hey it’s an alpha version. *update* Someone said record button won’t work with the lens in autofocus mode so I’ll have to try with AF off.

So it looks like it shows great promise. Having audio feed into both channels at once with internal and external mic is great. Focus peaking somewhat works. Live audio meters are darling and I don’t know why Canon doesn’t just have that on in the native firmware.

Hopefully in a week or two they will have some of these bugs worked through. Great work is being done on the project. May hat’s off to them.

UPDATE (4/27/11)

Zsolt Sz. Sztupák has released the his fourth alpha release of the Magic Lantern firmware here and this time it has install instructions, a manual, all the files needed (except MacBoot if you choose to use that to prepare your SD cards).

I still can’t get the firmware to set the bootflag on my 60D for some reason despite preparing a 32GB & 2GB SD card according to instructions using MacBoot and later trying with a script command via my Terminal app. According to the Wiki site the ML firmware currently doesn’t set bootflag.

Users should wait until the firmware is at least out of alpha stage before trying an install. It is still unknown if the 60D has a firmware upgrade counter like the Canon 7D. The counter will only allow a certain number of firmware updates. After that the camera will lock-out the user from performing anymore updates, even official ones from Canon.

UPDATE (7/17/11)

Magic Lantern has a new Wiki page for 60D owners which is unified with some of the Rebel versions of Magic Lantern

http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Unified

If you follow the links and download the firmware make sure you download the correct version! The filename of the zipped file and extracted folder should say 60D  in it if that’s the camera you’re going to run ML on.

This is a great update! Loading of the firmware is so fast it’s close to using the native firmware as there’s no start-up wait screen anymore.