If you shoot video on a Canon DSLR, you’re most likely aware of the Magic Lantern hack. I’ve been running it on my camera for a few years now, and it’s insanely awesome. It has a bunch of cool features for both video and photography, but today I’d just like to talk about one – cropmarks.
Apart from the audio monitoring options, crop marks are the big reason that I installed Magic Lantern in the first place. They’re simple images that allow you to place arbitrary overlays over an image. If you’ve ever shot with the intention of cropping 16:9 down to 2.35:1, then you’ll know how much the ability to place markers on your screen can come in handy.
They’re also super useful if you want title/action safe markers, or to block out where a lower third or
Magic Lantern comes with a small selection of cropmarks, and there’s a few more online, but nothing’s ever really been exactly what I wanted – so I’ve come up with my own, and I figure I might as well make then available for download.
There’s four cropmark files in total. They’re all correctly formatted for all Magic Lantern-compatible cameras, although they’ve only been tested on my 60D. To that end, they’ve been correctly RLE compressed, so they’ll work on the 60D and the 1100D – plus, they’ll take up less room on other cameras.
They do have a bunch of 1-pixel lines, so they probably won’t look good if your camera has a 4:3 screen (they look great on a 3:2 screen, though).
So, without any further ado, here’s the collection:
EBU standard (I think) title and action safe marks, plus centre cross
Semi-transparent 2.35:1 matte, plus title/action safe and centre cross
These cropmarks are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to modify and share these as you wish, so long as you provide attribution and share again under the same licence. You can use these in the process of making commercial projects, but you can’t package them up and sell them.
If you want a modification to these cropmarks, let me know in the comments! You can also learn how to make your own cropmarks at the Magic Lantern Wiki