DSLR videography has literally exploded in the last couple years and I am a huge fan (you can read up on my DSLR videography recommendations here); here’s a great hack that can let you trigger video on your Canon DSLR by hacking the IR controller with Arduino so you can turn the video on/off from up to 150-300 feet range.
I had a problem that I needed to solve:
Remotely and wireless-ly trigger the video recording on my Canon 60D DSLR camera, non-line of sight, from further than an IR remote would allow.
This would eliminate a lot of dead footage when shooting solo or when you want to be in the shot with other people.
As anyone who has looked into this knows, there are NO commercially available systems (or even really any hacked together non-commercial systems that I could find) available for doing this. Still pictures, no problem, but Canon doesn’t have a way to do that for video without an IR remote (which is about 10ft, line of sight range). I looked into what I had (both materials and skillset), and decided on building a solution. This should work on any Canon DSLR that shoots video (T2i, T3i, 60d, 7d, 5d Mk2) but I have only tested it on my camera.
My solution uses an atmega328 chip on proto board (basically just a scratch built Arduino), a commercially available RF photo trigger and an IR LED to trigger the camera to record.
