Magic Lantern Raw Video Converter

Updated: September 17, 2026

Magic Lantern is a firmware add-on for Canon digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras and the EOS M. It adds features for DSLR filmmaking and still photography, and is free and open-source. The most important feature of ML is the ability to shoot video in RAW. Fast CinemaDNG Processor can read and process Magic Lantern MLV files directly, without MLVFS or any other software.

mlv converter Fast CinemaDNG Processor software could work as a transcoder or converter for MLV files from Canon cameras. This is important issue to offer further footage editing. We can do not only transcoding, we've implemented crop, trim, audio files extraction, etc. Smooth real time preview is a must to give the user an opportunity to see processed footage before transcoding.

How these numbers were measured. Fastvideo benchmarks are measured on NVIDIA GPUs, timing pure GPU processing at the resolution, bit depth, format and quality stated on this page. See the full benchmark methodology and test environment and the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF). Our tools are open source on GitHub and built on NVIDIA CUDA.

Check a single module. Every module in the Fastvideo SDK comes with a command-line sample. Run it on your own images on your own GPU and compare the result with the figures published here.

Check the whole pipeline. A module in the middle of a pipeline cannot be judged on its own: its input is hard to prepare, and its output is an intermediate product you cannot look at. What matters is how it changes the final image and the total time of the schema. Two of our applications run the complete pipeline and report the time of every stage — FastVCR (live cameras or RAW files from disk, so no camera is required) and Fast CinemaDNG (DNG files, offline), both built on our GPU RAW Processor pipeline. The benchmark module is included in the free builds of both applications.

Detailed benchmark data. Measured results are published on our benchmark pages: all benchmarks.

We wrote these algorithms ourselves

Image processing has always been a trade-off between quality and speed. The methods that give a good result take minutes per frame; the fast ones leave halos and artifacts. The reason is the compute budget: on a CPU there was never enough of it, so algorithms were simplified — and much of the industry still runs on simplifications accepted decades ago.

Fastvideo’s codecs and ISP modules are neither ports of that legacy nor wrappers around third-party code. We designed — and in many cases invented — the algorithms behind our demosaicing, denoising, tone mapping and JPEG/JPEG2000 codecs, and wrote them for CUDA from the start, on top of image-processing expertise built since 2009. An algorithm moved to the GPU still carries the compromises it was simplified for; ours were never made under that constraint. On a modern GPU the budget is large enough that, for practical workloads, the choice between quality and speed no longer has to be made.

That is why you get a complete, tuned imaging solution rather than a bag of GPU primitives — and why, when your pipeline needs something specific, we can change the algorithm itself, not just call it.

Trusted by imaging teams

“Fastvideo SDK is lightning fast… we can now process a 28,800 image sequence set in under 10 minutes, instead of 10 hours.”
— Infinite Realities

MLV converter features

Support of standard MLV files, including spanned files
Real-time MLV processing and preview for compressed and uncompressed files
Crop and trim
Export of audio file from MLV
MLV preprocessing on GPU
MLV to DNG / CDNG / CinemaDNG convertion (uncompressed DNG or CDNG, CinemaDNG with lossless JPEG compression
MLV to TIFF, MLV to JPG, MLV to EXR, MLV to JP2 (expected soon)
MLV to Apple ProRes 422 LT, 422, 422 HQ, 4444, 4444 XQ
MLV to video: MLV to MP4

Apart from conventional MLV workflow, where we need to convert MLV to DNG sequence, then to create proxies for further processing and color grading, now we can also do all these things at the same pipeline, because we don't need neither DNG nor proxies for MLV processing, everything could be done on GPU in real-time, starting from RAW MLV to final color corrected video at full resolution.

Full version of that pipeline is implemented in Fast CinemaDNG Processor software. Please visit www.fastcinemadng.com to download the software.

Useful links:

Download Fast CinemaDNG Processor software

About the author

Fyodor Serzhenko, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Fastvideo. He earned his PhD at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1993. Since 2009 he has led the development of Fastvideo’s GPU-accelerated image codecs and ISP modules, including the Fastvideo SDK. Connect on LinkedIn.

Why you can trust these results

Fastvideo has built GPU-accelerated image processing software since 2009. Our codecs comply with the standards they implement — JPEG (ITU-T T.81 / ISO IEC 10918) and JPEG2000 (ITU-T T.800 / ISO IEC 15444) — and our tools are open source on GitHub. Every performance figure we publish is reproducible: see our benchmark methodology, download the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF), and measure it on your own GPU.

Magic Lantern Raw Video Converter

Trusted by imaging teams

MLV converter features

About the author

Why you can trust these results

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