For those of you not familiar with what is going on in the DSLR world, everything shifted when the 5D Mark II came out. We are talking earthquake-like fault lines. It gave every indy film-maker an insta-hard-on.
It was just another standard hand-held photographer's camera until some gent got a pre-release version and showed the world its capacity to capture film-like imagery -- beautiful blacks, shallow depth-of-field, that 24-frames-a-second look, etc.
Even with high-end prosumer cameras, you couldn't quite nail the cinema-look without resorting to actual film. But this toy camera came out of nowhere and was capturing images several times better than anyone could have expected!
So each time we see a news story like this, it is validation of the technology and that in a very short time, all of us will have the ability to capture the types of motion images that normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And as is often the case with technology leveling the playing field, the winners will be the folks that are daring and creative!
> all of us will have the ability to capture the types of motion images that normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
well, not really. You see, camera was never the expensive part. Not even Arri. For example good Cooke S4 lenses cost as much as a fine new Audi. Hell, even Fischer stand costs like a car, and having a good stand+lens is more important than camera itself. Not to mention good lighting, without which shot looks like crap. You can rent RED+S4 kit for about ~600€ per day though - add light, electricity etc.. and it is more cheaper than ever. But this "we can all do it a la panavision, without panavision" is BS IMO.
Not trying to be rude or anything, just trying to put some things into perspective. I do like the trend of cheap good cameras (like RED - which is borderline great), but camera is only one tiny part of the picture.
Oh, I agree that the camera is just one tool in a filmmaker's arsenal. Great film is a combination of amazing talent and technology.
My point is that we've never seen a leap in technology quite like this one. You could mount this camera on a rock at the beach and potentially pull in film-grade footage. Until now, you simply couldn't, short of renting Arri, buying filmstock, paying for processing, grading and converting it to the digital domain.
That changes things. And it is that shift in power, through technology, that is fascinating.
That's the beauty of the Canon 5D Mk2 -- off-the-shelf easily available Canon lenses. They're lenses most photographers already have. And no additional work to make them work for film. A decent L lens is $1000. Not bad at all.
as you said, it's not only the camera. With a TV of film camera, you need a production crew, whereas you can get away with just 2 other person with a 5dmkii setup. Apart from staff expenses, this also means you get jobs done faster, or you can get more takes.
Right. RED One was designed from the ground-up to be the ultimate digital cinema camera. The 5D-M2? A few software engineers likely spent a week or two tweaking out the video capture that tied into whatever chip the hardware guys had slapped into the machine. RED will need to adjust if it wants to capture part of the hungry indy crowd.
I own the 5DmII. The HD video really is amazing–especially with fast lenses (my favorites are the 35/1.4 and 135/2).
The main problem is that it's hard to handle and focus the camera hand-held. You really need a good rig and focus ring to get it right. And some of those from Redrock or Zacuto can cost almost as much as the camera body.
If you have an auto-focusing lens, will it continually focus while you are recording video? That's the one thing that's held me back from upgrading. I badly want to combine my DSLR with my camcorder--I hate having to decide which one I'm going to carry with me.
If you're just getting feet wet, the (~$1000) Canon T2i will do that. but most of the time you wouldn't want to. Autofocus is horrible on video, even on the best gear I have used (like a varicam). YMMV may vary of course if you are trying to shoot sports or certain documentary stuff.
I think you would do far better to get some good used manual lenses and acquaint yourself with focusing manually.
if you want an auto-focusing setup, get the panasonic gh1 with the specially designed lens 14-140mm.
But people get the canon 5d or the 7d because of the film look. The sensor is bigger so you get shallower depth of field, and also you get wider selection of lenses
> In 2008, House was distributed in a total of 66 countries. With an audience of over 81.8 million worldwide...
There’s only like 6bn people on the globe, right? And that’s including feral wolf children and fuel-starved hermits living on sun tea in the Chinese desert. And yet, if aliens did some random sampling of people around Earth, they’d find that more than one in every hundred of us watches House. “The Earthlings’ religion is based on weekly silent observances of medicine-man figure called ‘Dwelling-Place’ in the local tongue. Possessing supernatural powers of observation and an ability to perform healing miracles, this god also suffers from hubris and vanity, and he is susceptible to the temptations of certain potions. Essentially, we are grading Earth’s religious development somewhere between animist and monotheistic. Not yet adequately prepared for Operation Helping Hand. Revisit in 1,000 local solar units.”http://modcult.org/read/2010/4/13/this-is-called-sending-the...
The D90 is easily the worst of the VDSLRs... for video. It's still one of the best mid-range DSLRs out there, if not the best. I have one too; the video is completely broken. While I have no direct experience with the 5D Mark II, rumour has it that the rolling shutter problems are considerably less noticeable.
A very close friend of mine has the 5D and she uses it to shoot video. The 5D is absolutely fantastic as a motion camera. If I didn't already have a stock of nikon lenses, I absolutely would have gotten the 5D.
On a related note, a few years back the movie "Cold Mountain" was edited entirely using Apple Final Cut Pro: http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/murch/ The editor, Walter Murch, received an Academy Award nomination for his work.
It shoots at 1080 with a great sensor, and can mount some very nice lenses for a relatively low price. Plus the 5DmkII is no slouch in the low-light/high-iso arena.
I have a D90. It is not usable as a motion picture camera at all. You need to evaluate if you're buying a motion camera, or a still camera. The D90 is a fantastic still camera...but if you're just getting into photo and don't have an investment in lenses...get the 5D.
I believe there as an update to the video processing on the D90 which removes a good amount of the jello-cam that blhack demonstrated. Although as an HD video camera, the D90 is still a little lacking (no 1080). As a stills camera, it is excellent.
Disclaimer: I use Nikon cameras (though not for video).
I have the D90 and have played the Canon. The D90 is no where near the same page for quality. It only does 720p for one and second it has a "jelly" motion issue where the sensor is not fast enough and if you move while shooting it gives a weird effect. Also you can only shoot five minutes at a time then the sensor needs to cool down.
If you don't pan at all, and use AE/AF lock effectively, you can shoot some decent 720p shots of static objects. Otherwise, fuggedaboutit. I shot about 3 clips with mine before giving up. I bought it for still shots, but this Canon makes me a bit envious.
Yes, it does; but it also can shoot video. I recently worked on a feature shot with a similar camera, and own one myself for the same reason.
Why use it this way? 3 reasons.
1. cost - it's dirt cheap compared to equivalent camcorders, and there is a very wide selection of lenses and accessories. Not as well optimized for the needs of moving pictures as other lenses (which have fewer glass elements but are easier to focus thanks to the way they are constructed) but nowhere near as expensive either. for perspective, a set of cine primes (fixed focal length lenses built for film use with industry-standard mounting connectors) can cost $250,000...or more. you can buy/rent and insure good quality still lenses for vastly less, and the disadvantages they impose are not all that serious.
2. Portability. a small indie film crew is 10 people and the camera is very obvious. A small crew shooting with a DSLR and an audio recorder can be as few as 3 people, which means you can shoot a scene in the middle of a busy street without attracting much attention. It is just so much more convenient, and saves even more money and time. the only downside to this is the ego sacrifice required to give up a big important-looking camera and the support staff required to babysit it. Instead you can just get a few of these things and shoot from multiple angles simultaneously which is an absolute godsend for editors, actors, producers, etc. Industry folk do love their high-tech gear but until recently things were at a pitch where the gear had to some extent become an end in itself and one had to spend a lot of money just to set it up every day before you photographed a single frame of the actual subject matter.
3. Light. These newer cameras have big sensors (the Canon 5DII in particular has a very large sensor for the available price) which means they can get a good-looking image with way less light than a typical pro video camera (and in turn that makes it easier to control the focus of the image). So you don't need truckloads full of lights...or the time to set the up...or all the noise of a generator to power them...or a bunch of grips to lift and carry them...and you don't have a forest of aluminum stands with lights and reflectors all over the set: which means you have a great deal more freedom in where you put the camera and how you move it around.
In short, they are awesome. There are some limitations, and some things you have to do differently in order to maintain image quality compared to other methods...but they are not that onerous and the cost savings are enormously worth it. I would never want to go back to the style of a big industrial set festooned with heavy equipment and crews. Small is beautiful.
Publicity for Canon? Create online buzz? Because it's a technical challenge? Less expensive? To get a different looks from other shows? Take your pick.
Doesn't look like he's talking about it at the moment, but Stu over at ProLost (author of the great indie film manual "The DV Rebel's Guide") covers the DSLR-for-filmmaking subject a lot and has lots of good technical (and technique) info if you're into that sort of thing:
If you're interested in this sort of thing, definitely check out DSLR News Shooter: http://www.dslrnewsshooter.com
The blog covers video journalists using DSLRs for their stories and the articles generally come with some great advice.
The sensor on the 5D is huge. Here's a graphic with most of the current video camera sensor sizes: http://rebelsguide.com/dl/sensorSizes_06_cheatSheet.png A bigger sensor means that it can operate well at very low light levels.
Also note that at $2500 this is by far the cheapest option for shooting feature quality films. There are some issues with audio, so you will have to record it using an external recorder, but with a nice mount, this is an amazing camera.
Interesting. The 5D is smaller and cheaper than RED, but not that much. I wonder if it was just an experiment for its own sake or if there was some deciding factor in favor of the 5D.
>The 5D is smaller and cheaper than RED, but not that much.
The RED approaches $20,000-$30,000 all in, no? Compare this to <$3000 for the 5D.
You can use any normal canon/zeiss/sigma lenses on either system.
The Canon is something that "regular" people have; several of my friends have them. You can walk into a fry's and buy one. This is not true of the red.
Correct. A fully rigged RED will put you in the $50k range. The RED is 100% designed as a filmmaker's tool, it is as solid as a rock. You can't even properly plug a microphone into the 5K-M2. But at the end of the day, they are both similar tools that create amazing imagery. Ford or Chevy for you?
I know nothing about Canon's product release cycles. Is now a good time to invest in this puppy? Or will the 5D Mark III or some such thing be out soon?
The 5D Mark II came out at the end of 2008. The Mark III is widely rumored, but hasn't been officially announced; most people are guessing it will arrive toward the end of 2010 or early 2011. canonrumors.com has lots of this kind of speculation...
It was just another standard hand-held photographer's camera until some gent got a pre-release version and showed the world its capacity to capture film-like imagery -- beautiful blacks, shallow depth-of-field, that 24-frames-a-second look, etc.
Even with high-end prosumer cameras, you couldn't quite nail the cinema-look without resorting to actual film. But this toy camera came out of nowhere and was capturing images several times better than anyone could have expected!
So each time we see a news story like this, it is validation of the technology and that in a very short time, all of us will have the ability to capture the types of motion images that normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And as is often the case with technology leveling the playing field, the winners will be the folks that are daring and creative!