OT: Canon officially announces frame-rate firmware for 5D

After a year and a half of pleading from the public and six months of fairly shameless hinting and rumor-mongering from the company itself, Canon today finally announced that there really will be a firmware fix for the 5D's frame-rate problem, and it's better than anybody had really hoped for. Not only are they turning on 24p and 25p, which was widely anticipated, but they're also fixing their oddball 30-frame-per-second format to conform to the NTSC standard 29.97 timebase.

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The addition of new frame rates expands the camera?s video potential, providing filmmakers with the ability to shoot 1080p Full HD footage at 24fps (actual 23.976fps) ? the optimum frame rate for cinematic video. 25fps support at both 1920x1080 and 640x480 resolutions will allow users to film at the frame rate required for the PAL broadcast standard, while the new firmware will also change the 30fps option to the NTSC video standard of 29.97fps.

They're saying the new firmware will be available in "mid-March."

Post-processing will still be necessary for nearly all workflows, since what comes out of the 5D is heavily compressed H.264, and virtually everybody will want to convert that to something like ProRes or DNxHD for editing and finishing. But previously, massive and time-consuming post-processing was necessary if you wanted to shoot sync sound with a 5D, and that post-processing had a nasty habit of introducing artifacts. When the 5D starts putting out standard frame rates, the need for that post-processing (and the artifacts that resulted from it) should go away.

Shooting with a DSLR isn't an automatic win over shooting with a traditional motion picture camera; rolling shutter is still an issue, and the oddball sensor sizes make choosing your focal length more trouble than it would be in an ideal world ? the 5D is Vistavision, of course, and the 1D's APS-H is sort of halfway between Super 35 and Vistavision. The 7D's APS-C sensor is close enough to being Super 35-sized that it basically makes no difference, which is awfully nice. Also, as far as I've heard Canon and Panavision are still on the outs legally, which means if you want to use cine lenses on a DSLR body you're going to have to look elsewhere for now. But at least the issues are relatively minor and can be worked around with some trial and error and cautious cinematography, rather than hours and hours and hours of rendering and hoping the optical-flow artifacts aren't too noticeable.

The complete press release is here:

[www.dpreview.com]

This will be great for those of us who use the 5D MKII. The only slight disappointment is the lack of 720/50/60p, which was shown in some earlier Canon presentations by reps. 720 60p would be very handy to have around but I can survive without it.

This update is also increasing the audio sampling rate from 44.1Khz to 48Khz and adding manual audio level control. Also live histogram in Live View mode. A very nice update that frankly, I doubted Canon would ever put out.

I shot a doc last year with the 5D MKII and it really can be quite challenging to shoot with. Focus with such shallow DOF is tough, the ergonomics are really bad for video shooting but the camera is definitely capable of recording nice images. And it is a great still camera too, I recently shot a series of portraits for a museum in LA, under video lighting no less at ISO 2500 and the resulting images look great.

Dan

Yeah, the first thing I've heard from everybody who's shot with the 5D is "don't even consider trying to use it without a Redrock rig. The body just doesn't have anything like the right mass or center of gravity without support rails and a ton of ballast. But hey, it's better than having a camera body that's too big to use practically, right?

Pictures of Robert Rodriguez shooing with a tricked out 7D (Zacuto rig) on a Music Vid recently in Austin

[philipbloom.co.uk]

Michael Horton
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An even smaller camera with a tricked out rig.

[www.engadget.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Back to the Future camera that shoots 24 frames per second without the ridiculous rigs that take a 2 ounce camera and make it weigh 55 lbs.LOL

Touche, filmman ! But can I ask - what is the camera in your photo ? It looks like an old Arri 16mm ST or 35mm IIC. Both horrible cameras to operate in my opinion. They suffered from the same problems as most of today's prosumer video cameras - they're ergonomic disasters. All the weight is in the operators hands and hopelessly out of balance. Give me a cat on the shoulder any day.

Interesting also, looking at Rodriguez's rig, to see that they've put the whole camera and lens way out in front of the operators body. Personally I'd want it as far back as possible. Not just for a better center of gravity, but also to avoid having every shot become a tracking shot. I mean, you do a 90 degree pan with that rig and the front element of the lens is going to go through a three foot arc.

> I mean, you do a 90 degree pan with that rig and the front element of the lens is going to go
>through a three foot arc.

Maybe you could attach some sort of weights so you can lean backwards like a steadicam?



www.strypesinpost.com

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Maybe you could attach some sort of weights so you can lean backwards like a steadicam?

HA. That's a great mental image.

It's a good point, though. As anybody who's ever had to wrestle with nodal pans in 3D animation can attest, rotating the camera about any point other than the focal node can cause really weird things to happen.

Then again, if you're shooting on a 7D, you're probably trying as hard as possible not to rotate the camera about any axis at all, to avoid jellocam.

I remember working once with a tripod that was designed to center the film plane with both the horizontal and vertical nodal points. It was a great idea but hopelessly impractical because the rig was totally out of balance. And if you put a zoom lens on the camera the whole point was wasted anyway.

And Jeff - I thought jellocam was all the rage these days...

"Rage" being the operative word, Mike?

What's happened to your signature image, Jeff ? It seems to have been awol for a few days.

Mine? Er ? as far as I can see, it looks fine. Is anybody else having a problem with it? (Not that it's all that important, really. "Put the moderator logo on your posts," they said. "The unwashed masses will bow down before you," they said. "You'll be greeted as a liberator," they said.)

Hmmm... All I've got is a little blue question mark. All the others seem fine. Maybe it's a gravitational anomaly down here in the southern hemisphere. Perhaps an unexpected consequence of the Chilean earthquake.

I see it just fine, just that the pluge seems off.



www.strypesinpost.com

Perhaps you could try this instead.







www.strypesinpost.com

I see it. Only mods can see it cause it contains adult material.




Michael Horton
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Pornographic Pluge.



www.strypesinpost.com

Curious. Just sent a screen grab to your gmail Jeff. Looks like we might have to wait a a little longer for the liberation.

The only thing peculiar about my picture-logo-doohickey-thing is that instead of engaging in complicated Internet wankery I just threw it on my iDisk. Does this link not work for you, Mike?

[homepage.mac.com]

Does this link not work for you, Mike?

Nope. Pure white screen. No pluge at all.

On the 550, there's a workaround for jellocam that also gives you a big effective zoom:

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In situations where the subject is further away, the EOS 550D Movie Crop function records with the central 640x480 pixel area of the sensor, creating an effective magnification of approximately seven times. The EOS 550D is the first in the EOS range to feature Movie Crop and gives consumers more flexibility to capture important moments which would otherwise be too far away.

We're all hoping for the central 1920x1080 pixels to be recorded in future Canon firmware upgrades - to be used with ultra wide lenses.

___________________________________________________
Alexandre Gollner,
Editor, Zone 2-North West, London

alex4d on twitter, facebook, .wordpress.com + .com

That's a lousy solution to rolling shutter artifacting. The right solution, and the one Canon is working like crazy on, is getting sensor read times down to the 5 millisecond range. Super 35 film has an effective "read time," if you want to think of it in those terms, of about four milliseconds. The new Mysterium X sensor from Red is coming in around 5 milliseconds for a Super 35 form factor, at 4.5K resolution, which basically eliminates rolling shutter entirely. Canon will get there.

But taking a roughly-equivalent-to-Super 35 5K sensor and cropping in to HD resolution? That's ridiculous. You can't get lenses that wide.

For a Super 35-sized image (either electronic sensor or film negative), a normal lens is 25mm; that's true regardless of the resolution of the sensor in question, because field of view is a function of image area, not resolution. But if you divide that Super 35-sized sensor into 5K pixels, then ignore all but the central 1920x1080 area, you end up with an image area that's (I'm doing the math in my head here; I think it's mostly right) about 20% smaller than 2/3". That'd put your normal lens focal length around nine millimeters. They don't make lenses that short. Panavision's shortest lens is 12.5, I think; Cooke's shortest S4 is 12mm, and the shortest Zeiss Master Prime is 14.

I wouldn't be surprised if, given the construction of DSLR camera bodies, it's physically impossible to build a lens with a 9mm focal length, even if you wanted to. The lens would have to be wedged inside the camera body.

So not only could you not shoot a wide-angle image on an HD crop of a 5K APS-C sensor, you couldn't even shoot a normal image. Every frame that comes off that camera would be telephoto, just like on 1/3" home-movie cameras.

That doesn't make cinematography impossible, of course. It just makes it so limited and fiddly as to be really annoying. Like pick-a-different-camera annoying.

(And that's without even getting into the depth-of-field issues that make larger image sizes desirable in the first place.)