Is the Canon 5DMK2 Good Enough for Pro Video Production

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 shocked than Canon when Filmmaker Vincent Laforet was among the first filmmakers let loose on the completely new digital camera. His very first attempt Nocturne wouldn’t disappoint, in truth it’s no overstatement to say it set the field of film-making on fire. The real reason for this is that the substantial full frame sensor within the camera permits the operator to generate a truly lovely depth of field that old fashioned small sensor camcorders cannot reproduce.

The conventional film cinema look is tough to define but one of the significant elements is the depth of field that a 35mm film aperture generates. The Sensor (or film gate) in the Canon 5D is a great deal larger than the sensor found in a 35mm movie camera, actually it’s closer 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 main issues is line skipping or moire. The canon has to remove information from the thousands of pixels that make up it’s sensor so that it can make a 1920 X 1080 HD file. It does this by throwing away every third line of information – line skipping. This could certainly turn out to be disastrous if you’re shooting a subject that has quite a few horizontal or vertical lines – as the image steps across the dumped lines of information it can look horrendous. I usually try to keep clear of check shirts!

Another hassle is picture ‘skew’, this is evident when panning left to right quickly – vertical lines bend and twist noticeably – this is a problem on all CMOS video sensors but notably poor 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 quite simply steer clear of any quick pans!

Another drawback may be the ‘form factor’. A DSLR is a very cumbersome form to film with, there is no focused eyepiece so just two points of contact – both hands. If at all possible three points of contact are necessary to get a secure image whilst filming handheld video. In the past two years quite a few amazing camera support systems have been produced by a wide group of suppliers but they all fundamentally do the exact same thing – deliver one more point of contact using a shoulder or chest support platform.

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 generates dazzling pictures it’s not considered to be a pro recording data format due to the H264 compression setting. That being said, the camera has been used for a great number of TV dramas, documentaries and features. It’s visual image beauty seemingly outweighing it’s technical limits.

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 Article Author, Mitchell Blatwood is a film maker constructing award winning film content for cinema, broadcast and corporate clients. He manages Tall Man Films and it has more than ten years experience with video production bristol. Please see the internet site for additional free tutorials.