You haven’t bought your DSLR camera to shoot video, did you? It wasn’t even possible until just now. A russian site has released a program that will let any Canon Liveview owners record video with their DSLR. And most importantly for Nikon fans, Olivier Giroux, a Nikon hacker, played with the software to make the D700 record video. Recording video isn’t that simple, so don’t mess with the software if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can always wait for Olivier Giroux to release his own recording software or buy a camcorder for all those home movies you want to make. Here’s what Olivier Giroux said:

The next day I noticed a wave of news about updated remote-control software by a 3rd party (i.e. not Nikon). That got me thinking… clearly there is an SDK for Nikon cameras. How hard is it to get? I wondered.

Not hard at all. Basic form-filling skills is all you need. Last night I downloaded out the D700 SDK. Minutes later I had built the sample remote program and was pulling my D700’s strings over USB. That includes control of the Live View feed.

Good news: it is a viable video source. It’s fast enough, and the quality is sufficient.

Bad news: it’s a bit too low-quality to be really exciting. It’s roughly 30% below 480p resolution. The most unfortunate thing is they create the Live-View image by decimating the sensor data rather than downsampling it - as a result it aliases, moirés and looks terrible in low light.

Nikon’s SDK is available for you to play with, but like we said before, we advise you not to do it if you’re not comfortable with it. Oh, and yes, the video above was shot with a Nokia D700.

via make