The Problems Encountered When Shooting Video on the Canon 5DMK2
On 17/9/2008 Canon produced the Canon 5D MK2, this camera has quickly proved to be radical for film makers everywhere across the planet – for the first time Canon created an HD full frame DSLR that was efficient at spectacular moving image capture.
This attribute was put in by Canon mainly because journalists have been demanding it for a long time, additionally the unity between stills photography and video inside the same system was rapidly becoming feasible.
Nobody was more stunned than Canon when film maker Vincent Laforet was among the first filmmakers let loose on the completely new camera. His first effort Nocturne would not disappoint, it’s no overstatement to say it set the field of film-making on fire. The true reason for this is the way the huge full frame sensor inside of the camera makes it possible for the operator to generate a truly wonderful depth of field that traditional small sensor cameras simply cannot replicate.
The traditional film cinema look is difficult to explain but one of the major factors is the depth of field that a 35mm film aperture creates. The Sensor (or film gate) in the Canon 5D is a great deal larger than the sensor used in a 35mm film camera, in truth it’s nearer to filming on 65mm.
Despite this astonishing depth of field property and it’s very quick adoption through the film making culture, the canon 5D MK2 camera does have it’s challenges when filming video.
One of the major challenges is line skipping or moire. The canon has to dispose of information from the several thousand pixels that make up it’s sensor to ensure that it can produce a 1920 X 1080 HD image. It does this by losing every third line of data – line skipping. This can prove disastrous for anyone who is filming a subject that has several horizontal or vertical lines – as when the image steps across the removed lines of data it can look unpleasant. I usually try to avoid check shirts!
Another drawback is picture ‘skew’, this is recognizable when panning left to right quickly – vertical lines bend and twist noticeably – this is a difficulty on all CMOS video sensors but famously terrible on the Canon because it’s scan rate from the top to the bottom of the sensor is very sluggish and there is no internal compensation. A solution to this is to simply stay away from any quick pans!
One more drawback may be the ‘form factor’. A DSLR is a very awkward design to film with, there is no professional eyepiece so just a couple of points of contact – both hands. If at all possible, three points of contact are needed to get a steady image while shooting handheld video. In the past two years numerous camera support devices have been designed by a vast array of manufacturers but they all essentially do the same task – give you one more point of contact through a shoulder or chest support solution.
The rear LCD monitor can certainly be troublesome to view in brilliant sunlight and there’s a lot of 3rd party products and solutions to cope with this, from inexpensive hoods to really expensive lensed eyepieces and additional displays operating off the built in mini HDMI port. There are many worries with the HDMI feed, most significantly, it is rather small and breakable. Additionally there is a delay when serving the image from the dslr to a monitor after pressing record, which means patiently waiting eight or nine seconds before obtaining a monitor image. This can be troubling in a documentary scenario.
The camera records in 8 bit quicktime H264 and even though this produces amazing pictures it isn’t really deemed to be a pro recording file format due to the H264 data compression. Having said that the camera has been employed for a great number of TV dramas, documentaries and features. It’s image attractiveness obviously outranking it’s technical restrictions.
In spite of the stated problems, many film makers (including myself) put up with these grievances because Canon have turned out a seriously superb, creative, film-making device. When they can improve the stumbling blocks with the MK3 then they’re going to have crafted a truly awesome camera at a astounding selling price.
The Author, Mitchell Blatwood is a film maker producing award winning video material designed for cinema, broadcast and corporate clientele. He owns Tall Man Films and has more than ten years experience of video production Cardiff. Kindly visit the internet site for further free guides.