Philip Bloom

I had mucked around with it briefly , but hadn’t really tried it out properly.

So a couple of days ago I took it out for the afternoon with Ryan Pointer from the Kauai Visitor Information Channel. They had hired me to come out for a week to take a look around with the idea of coming back for a much longer trip.

I did some shots of the Taro fields, a few shots of the river, a few shots of the beach and some high shots…Because some of the clips were long “timelapses” I used up my 32gb pretty fast.

It’s a relatively steep learning curve, especially coming after using the Panasonic Lumix GH1 for a couple of weeks. The video mode of the 5dmk2, as many of you already know, it a bit of a b**** to use! Lack of manual controls, 12 minutes clips, inability to lock exposure between takes…the list goes on. One way around the lack of manual controls to start with is don’t use Canon glass. I used all my Nikon lenses that I normally use with my Letus Ulitmate. My fast Zeiss primes, my f2.8 Nikon zooms and my shift tilt Hartblei. All I used was a £15 EOS to Nikon adaptor from ebay and it worked a treat. Obviously all auto controls for stills are lost with these lenses but for video they are perfect as they have manual aperture so you can stay wide open and the camera compensates with shutter/ ISO (ISO can be locked, as far as I know shutter can’t)

We were out for about 4 hours or so…once I had got my head around how to lock ISO I was really happy with the results I was getting. yes, I had to be careful of the jello vision, but it did perform beautifully and my lenses worked brilliantly. 

Codec wise it kinda sucks to be honest. It records in H264 .mov which is a finishing format, not an acquisition format. So you really have to transcode it before editing it. I used MPEG streamclip, thanks to all my twitter buddies for help and advice there! I converted to XDCAM EX 35mbps 30p. I edit in this codec a lot and it doesn’t create huge files like pro res does.

A big thanks to little Reagan above and his dad for being my models. I just asked them on the beach and they said yes. Easy filming in the US!!

So all shot on 5dmk2, apart from very last shot…i had run out of card space so had to use the ex1 for that shot…sorry…i know it’s not pure now!!

Click here to see the short

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 07:53 and is filed under DSLRs, Other. 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.