With this smart, cheap and easy hack, you can finally monitor sound on your Canon 7D, which is a perfect camera for video shooting, but is a little limited, as it was one of the first great video DSLR cameras on the market and therefore not that prioritized be Magic Lantern. The monitor sound is quite good also!

It’s always a problem for me, when filming at noisy places, that I can’t hear the interviewer, when using a wireless microphone on the set. It sucks not to know if we are getting sound in, and to know exactly what is going on. That is quite important in order to know how to frame the picture, in my opinion.

Magic Lantern and getting started

With the 2.0.3 firmware update to Canon 7D, and the Magic Lantern installed, which is really easy done, just use the steps provided on their page – you are flying with the 7D for video recording!

Just remember to set the Magic Lantern “Analouge Audio gain” to +20, in order to have the Magic Lantern audio-bars showing anything.

Cheap and easy / Quick ‘n Dirty

I bought all I needed on ebay for around $10 – so really easy and very affordable!! It’s not the perfect solution, though – and I further down I will describe a perfect, yet also quite expensive solution for this problem.

Other solutions – and the perfect one

It is also possible to use a normal microphone or possible to use two at the same time! It’s quite smart!

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The perfect solution

is not really there – but! If you have a quite big setup with monitor-screen, this might be what you need for perfect monitor sound on Canon 7D with Magic Lantern: