From Melissa
The Canon EOS 5D mark II the new buzz word amongst cinematographers and the likes. Great, but where does that leave editors? Well upon further investigation and conversation with people who know a lot more about these things than myself I started discovering a number of things that would effect my workflow as the offline editor to a project choosing this format.
1. Shoots at 29.97 fps – The new Firmware upgrade allows you to shoot 24fps and 25fps
2. Uses the H.264 Codec. It’s a highly compressed image (with a great codec sure). I think you need to choose to use it for aesthetic reasons more than anything else.
3. Sound needs to be recorded on a separate device – therefore I now also need my assistant to sync sound – not a problem if I have time in the edit suite, but who does these days with budgets and schedules shrinking all the time especially on our wonderful SABC drama series’ or independent feature films.
4. “Great looking image” but it has very little latitude in the luminance levels when grading.
5. It has a very limited depth of field, which makes filming with it pretty tricky unless it’s a static shot.
6. It’s a tapeless format so you need a minimum of 3 backups for insurance purposes. Even more hard drives floating around the edit suite because most producers seem to believe a pile of Lacie Hard drives make the grade when choosing their storage devices. Boy, are they wrong and when are they gonna learn? And as a side note – How are we choosing to archive our projects these days? Leave it on a hard drive indefinitely… Hoping it’ll start up again one of these days? Only one person has offered me a suitable solution LTO’s. (Another discussion all on it’s own, because I’m sure there are a few of you who have never heard this term before.)
Anyway I’m still not convinced about why people would want to shoot with it. Is just a matter of I can so I will? In reality this is a stills camera that has the ability to shoot video but does that mean we should be shooting projects on it? I don’t think so. There are Hollywood blockbusters using the Canon EOS 5D to shoot sections of their films (which is great!) but they have time and money on their side.
From Stephen:
Of course most of this camera is director/DOP’s concern.
For now it’s important as a potential game-changer and headache-maker in post.
In FCP, mutli-stream realtime playback of the H264s may not be possible or fast enough, depending on your system. The kneejerk recommendation is transcode to ProRes. If you can’t justify the extra disk space (about 3.5 or 5.5 times, for ProRes and ProRes HQ respectively) , then convert to XDCAM EX like these guys are suggesting. If you’re running on a light-weight FCP system, try going to DV or even Apple Intermediate Codec – or the new ProRes 422 Proxy if you’re on FCP 7/Studio 3. With the exception of ProRes, I’d recommend re-linking to the original H264s before going to online, for the least digital generations possible.
I haven’t used this camera’s footage with Avid yet, but I imagine heading to DNxHD on ingest would be your best bet.
I must add: the 5D presents quite a bit of skew, also known as rolling shutter. Skew gives me a headache, and plays havoc with any motion tracking since the geometry of the scene deforms when you pan. Lots of cameras skew a little when you whip ‘em around (including rolling shutter film cameras and the RED), but the 5D skews a lot. My opinion is that locked off or slow movements pans are acceptable, but high-speed music video styles will leaving you wincing. Since you have some spare resolution (well, only if you’re not going out at 1080) you can hand de-skew with great effort and mixed results.
As for the 29.97/30 –> 25 thing … it’s the same as always. 25 doesn’t go into 30 at all neatly; the conversions look bad. In a recent case I was lucky enough not to need sync sound, so I simply rendered the 30fps H264s out at 25 (which works out as a slow down of ~16%) and left it at that. You can do the conversion at the beginning or end, it’ll just affect whether your graphics have to be squished from 30 to 25 as well. Pray for the rumoured firmware update allowing 25/24p recording, in the meantime get the conversion done on some high-end monster.
Have a look at this blog, entitled “Canon EOS 5D Mark II in the real world”.
Oh, and David Lackey writes here about digital formats, hype and reality.