OT: Canon EOS 5D

Those of you interested in the Canon 5D the cam that shoots 1080P video might want to watch this

[www.macvideo.tv]

It's from a road trip Rick Young, Dean Cleary, Rick Young and I took down Highway 1 just after the SuperMeet at Macworld. Rick Young put it together and Dan Berube is trying his best to figure out how to use his brand new Canon 5D. Its a great little movie for those that just got this cam or those that might get it.

Conclusion? Get it for the wonderful pictures it can take and put it on a tripod if taking video and keep practicing.

Michael Horton
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Thanks for the link

I've seen some footage from this camera and it is great apart from all the shooting limitations.
Also a fantastic still camera, I own a 1ds mkII.
Maybe they (canon) will fix some things with a firmware update.
Over here (uk) its £2000 and I already own a lot of L series lenses so its a great deal.

Derek

The footage has to be played with carefully I've done a lot of testing with the footage and I am not impressed with the compression artifacts and awful jelly-vision rolling shutter issues.

I would get it as a stills camera as its great for that - but the HD sucks if you need it for serious work. I would recommend you borrow or test it before you commit to £2000. Better still wait for the mark III which I presume Canon will address ALL the shortcomings (won't you Canon!).

We were going to shoot a webseries with a couple of them but the wobble vision just makes you feel sick with anything other than very gentle moves and throw a colour corrector on it and the compression shows up like a badly encoded SVCD!

Such a shame.



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Thanks for the info, I was going to test one first myself, anyway my main purpose was its stills capability.

thanks again

Derek

Amazing stills!

I just wish they thought more carefully about the auto-settings and the compression and the framerate!



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I for one know how hard it is to put decent compression in camera :-) It's actually very tricky indeed.

Yes G! We know... marvelous job you have done so far too!

They should hire you at Canon after you finish up with RED



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Yeah, right. I'm with RED for the long haul. I'm not about to jump ships!

One issue Canon have, is that there are many h.264 decoders, and all will decode the image differently. They've basically handed over a critical element of image quality control to 3rd parties. Look at how recent Quicktime changes effect level mapping from their h.264 files.

Nothing better than to compete with oneself... On the up side, you'll always win.



www.strypesinpost.com

That is crazy nice footage. I can't see taking extended video with it without some elaborate stabilizing rig though (tripod will not be enough IMHO). I would rather buy a video camcorder that takes amazing stills. While we're talking Canon...has anyone seen the new Vixia HS20 coming out in Spring? It's a Dual-flash full HD (1920 x 1080) camcorder with an 8 MP still camera built in...it has a 1/2.6" 8.59 Megapixel HD CMOS image sensor, similar to the CMOS image sensors in Canon's EOS Series Digital SLR cameras. I am waiting on & will be buying this puppy:

[www.usa.canon.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Sounds interesting, but 3264 x 1840 does not scale nicely to 1920x1080. Indeed, that's also the issue with the 5D2 which appears to skip lines on readout and do some less than optimum scaling to produce it's "1920x1080".

Graeme

Someday we will be shooting TV shows with still cameras...



www.strypesinpost.com

Someday we will be shooting TV shows with lipstick cameras.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Lol... A Firestore on the lipstick cam.



www.strypesinpost.com

I see the 5D Mark II as a milestone more than anything. I've had a chance to use one extensively and I can say cameras like the EX1, HVX200 or HMC150 easily best the quality of its video signal- by a long shot. The compression artifacts are often highly visible and unpredictably noisy and the skewing is extreme compared to a camera designed first for motion. That said, the depth of field effects you can create with the great Canon still optics are worth the price of admission and then some.

If Canon can improve the codec- say switch over to something like ProRes, Cineform or perhaps AVCHD, add in 24p, and address skew to the level it's addressed on say the EX1 they'd truly have a great camera. Well that and add full manual exposure control, better focusing aids and audio level control. But then they'd basically have recreated an XL2 with a massive imager. And I suspect that's causing a fair amount of internal strife within the company- as to whether the SLR division would pose a competitive threat to the camcorder division.

Personally I think they should go full steam ahead because with cameras like the Scarlet and the Ikonscop DII on the horizon, no one who cares about having the best image will touch HDV cameras with 1/3" and 1/2" CCDs anymore. This could be their best shot at staying in the game long term.

Noah

Final Cut Studio Training, featuring the HVX200, EX1, EX3, DVX100, DVDSP and Color at [www.callboxlive.com]!
Author, RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera available now at: [www.amazon.com].
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All Canon have to do is figure out how to read the sensor at full speed without skipping 2 out of every 3 lines. What this means is their CMOS technology is really about 10fps. They've got a fair way to go before they can get the speed needed.

On the list of things Canon has to change before the 5D can even be considered for motion, one simply must include a manual shutter. I'd say, in fact, that that should be the very first thing on the list, even before the frame rate.

Yes, the fact that the 5D doesn't shoot proper NTSC 30p, but rather a totally non-standard "30.0p" is a big deal. But that could conceivably be worked around by conforming to 30p in post; the timing difference would be slight enough that for many uses it wouldn't matter. If 30p is acceptable ? that is, actual 30p, at 29.97 frames a second ? then conforming from 30.0 to 29.97 would be an okay part of the workflow.

But if you can't lock the shutter off to 1/60 when you're shooting 30 frames a second, then there's no way to control your motion blur. I mean, one of the very first rules of cinematography ? right up there with "glass goes toward talent" ? is that you never use your shutter to control your exposure. Exposure is controlled with the lens aperture and ND filters; the shutter is always half of your frame rate, unless you're Janusz Kaminski shooting the D-Day invasion.

Until Canon lets you manually lock the shutter speed down, there's not going to be anything you can do to keep yourself from ending up with streaky or jittery footage.

Yes, a Vistavision-format sensor is a very cool thing, depth-of-field wise. No argument there. But considering the sheer volume of dramatic material that's been shot with the 2/3rds-inch F900 series, it seems pretty obvious that having a S35 or VV sensor isn't the be-all, end-all of digital cinematography.

Good points Jeff but its not just the Shutter speed in respect of motion blur - the speed of the readout is also very poor and like many CMOS sensors is a rolling shutter and very slow - so you end up with a skewed image when you move horizontally at any speed.

This produces an effect akin to everything being made of jello (Jelly to the UK peeps).

RED and the CMOS sensor SONYs have this issue but they are not nearly as bad.

Graeme might want to update us as to how much or if it still is an issue on the RED ONE.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Max fps of the sensor is somewhat related to the speed of the read/reset time that influences image skew. RED One is a 60fps sensor with a fast read / reset time. The residual skew has been vastly reduced over firmware builds to it's present very low level, which will be reduced still further for future cameras. Because a mirror shutter spins at a finite speed, film cameras also exhibit skew.

Hey lets all go and buy a Phantom 4k

Derek