WARNING: There is a lot of techno babel in this blog. So I apologise in advance. However if you speak geek read on…

I finally got round to Ander’s place today to try out the 5D. I also brought around a wally dolly and a tripod. After some quick shooting (and wonderful dinner later – thanks Alyssa and Anders!), I gathered the files and toddled home to see what I could do with them.

The link below is a quick edit (and slightly overgraded) cut of some of the footage shot today as well as some other test footage Anders shot.

Ok so here’s a general lowdown on what I thought of the video features of the 5d (And I am only evaluating the video side, I am sure the camera side is extremely nice!)

SHOOTING
It does extremely well in low light. I was very surprised at how well I was capturing in low light conditions with very little noise.

Some oddities though are that it doesn’t exactly let you manually set the aperture before shooting. That is I can’t dial it in to f2.8, I literally had to point it at something that would trigger the auto exposure to be correct, lock that setting in and then begin shooting. A little frustrating as I really really wanted to set the exposure!!!! arrrghhh. If anyone knows how, please let me know. But the auto exposure isn’t bad per say, I just don’t want to rely on it to make it looked right!

The rolling shutter problem didn’t seem nearly as evident as I thought it would. But I wasn’t pan whipping or running like a mad man. And my short film won’t be that anyways, so I dont think I have too much to worry about. Even stuff shot on the dolly looked fine, so no problems there.

The fact that its shot on 30p is kinda annoying. I really wanted 25/24 P!!!
I hope this gets updated in the next one.

The handheld stuff looks too light (like a handicam almost). I guess to make it look better, you’d probably have to throw more weight onto it or get some sort of rail system going.

There is a way to hook up an external monitor in case you wanted one using an HD cable or just a composite one.

EDITING

H264 at 4.7Mbps is not cool for editing. H264 in general is a terrible codec for editing so I decided to just simply take all the clips and convert into prores files (I know its terrible, but what else can I do??? try editing with H264 !!! its nasty as!!!)

Grading it didn’t seem too bad. About as good as anything HDV out there in my humble opinion. But no, this is no RED footage, but then again that isn’t really any surprise is it?

Sound was ok. As standard as any handicam.

I conformed the video to 25 frames (since there was no lip syncing) and it seemed ok.

Overall the camera should hold up for our shoot and I think we’ll get some nice pictures out of it. I look forward to seeing what the end product will be!

Talked to my sister about the script. Ending needs a little bit of work. But I am definitely getting closer!

BTW does anyone have an old telephone???

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.