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Canon 5d mk2

When the mention of shooting serious video with the Canon 5D MkII DSLR appeared on professional video forums you could almost hear the laughter from the cognoscenti. Why on earth would you want to do that! But then it wasn’t that long ago that people were laughing at the idea of shooting video with a camera backed by a sunglasses manufacturer!

Rust and original thinking never sleep and now, believe it or not, this Canon DSLR camera is paying for itself shooting on jobs around the world, there is even a movie being shot with it. Formats and cameras that are losing out include film and that sunglasses guy’s product.

Some quick specs. The size of the Canon’s sensor is 21.1 megapixel full frame 24 x 36mm CMOS sensor, and just for some comparison the 35mm format is 24.89mm x 18.6mm, the RED One’s Mysterium sensor measures 24.4mm x 13.7mm and the Sony EX1 is 6.97mm x 3.92mm. The 5D MkII shoots 1920x1080 QuickTime MPEG-4 H.264 compressed files from this sensor at a reported 38 Mb/s data rate.

But before you take another look at this the 5D MkII you have to understand that working with it isn’t easy, especially as the camera’s video mode is automatic and doesn’t allow any manual controls. But necessity being the mother of invention and with the recession biting harder than a Staffordshire bull terrier, ways to trick and fool the internal camera software have been invented by videographers who love a beautiful and expensive looking image with ‘film like’ depth of field from a £2000 body and lots of lenses to play with.

Fixes for the MkII are varied but usually mean either using Nikon lenses with an adapter to manually choose an aperture or more unusual practices like breaking the connection between camera and lens which give you a zero reading then using a DoF preview button to keep the f stop you have already chosen. (Don’t worry there are videos on YouTube showing you how to do it.)

But just grab a browser and take in this new sub-culture that’s bubbling away like a richly flavoured stew (www.cinema5d.com is a good place to start). Most of the footage is pretty awful but then you get some that will take your breath away, and then you see commercial content with products whose names you recognise.

One such intrepid cameraman is Andrew Rodger who was commissioned to shoot a music promo for a band called Evenflowerskill (Watch it at www.vimeo.com/3999097). His choices were RED or perhaps XDCAM but he had heard that the RED post route was problematic and he had seen the images you could get from the 5D MkII. (That and his mate had bought one).

The shoot was truly gruelling and involved complicated slowing and pitch shifting up of the backing track and also locking exposure by the ‘breaking of connection’ method! Andrew was on the brink of throwing in the towel and booking a RED but got through it and the record company loved it and didn’t even know it was shot with a stills camera.

The question many are asking is why has Canon crippled this camera so much for the professional videographers that they claim to want to interest with their in-built movie mode? Those videographers are so incensed that a petition has even been published to try and persuade Canon to issue a firmware upgrade to at least enable some manual control.

Good question and watch this space as rumours abound that Canon will either issue some firmware or even launch a new camera just for video. Well the HDV camcorders guys might have something to say about a new product launch but some new firmware might be around the corner. If they don’t do anything then that sunglasses guy might have it all his own way. Mind you there is a stills manufacturer without a camcorder product line – hello Nikon!

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