Not only did it solve my video length problem, it also breathes new life into aging hardware bringing it closer in capability to more modern day analogs. Magic Lantern provides not only a workaround for recording longer segments of video, but also has a myriad of other updates like audio meters, waveforms, focus peaking, bitrate control, time-lapse and many, many other enhancements. It is an open (GPL) framework for developing extensions to the official software.'

According to their own wiki, 'Magic Lantern is an enhancement atop of Canon's firmware that frees your Canon DSLR, allowing you to use many useful features. I love it when I come across some settings or software that brings new life into old technology. So instead of adding support for larger file size using a different filesystem (the camera can read and write to the exFAT filesystem that supports larger files), the engineers simply decided to make video recordings stop at the 4GB limit.Īs a result, I later moved on to other DSLR cameras that can record any length of video necessary for my needs thus putting the t3i aside and unused for years. It just so happened that 12 minutes of 1080p video uses up 4GB of space. The filesystem has a limit of 4GB file sizes. The card gets formatted with the old an outdated FAT filesystem.

The 'limitation' was not a camera problem, but a 'filesystem' problem. After all, there must have been a good reason as to why I could only record 12 minutes of 1080p video. At the time, I sort of just lived with it.

Magic lantern canon