Digital Envisions

On 17/9/2008 Canon introduced the Canon 5D MK2, this camera has successfully proved to be revolutionary for filmmakers everywhere across the planet – for the first time Canon introduced an HD full frame DSLR that is great for really impressive video image recording.

This element was added by Canon mainly because journalists had been demanding it for a while and the unity between stills photography and video in the same device was quickly becoming viable.

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 standard film cinema look is quiet difficult to outline but one of the main components is the depth of field that any 35mm film aperture produces. The Sensor (or film gate) in the Canon 5D is even bigger than the sensor within a 35mm movie camera, in truth it’s nearer to shooting 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 difficulty is image ‘skew’, this is evident when panning left to right swiftly – vertical lines bend and twist noticeably – this is a dilemma on all CMOS video sensors but famously 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 way around this is to simply stay clear of any quick pans!

Another obstacle is definitely the ‘form factor’. A DSLR is a very awkward form to film with, there is no focused eyepiece so only two points of contact – both hands. In a perfect world three points of contact are necessary to get a stable image whilst shooting hand held video. In the past two years a large number of proprietary camera support devices have been devised by a vast array of companies but they all fundamentally do the same task – supply one more point of contact by means of a shoulder or chest support technique.

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 though this creates fabulous video it is really not considered to be a professional recording data format due to the H264 compression. With that said, the camera has been used for quite a few TV dramas, documentaries and features. It’s visual image attractiveness outranking it’s technological limitations.

Even with the listed issues, many filmmakers (including myself) tolerate these troubles simply because Canon have put together a wonderful, creative, film-making device. When they improve the grievances with the MK3 then they’ll have assembled a truly remarkable camera at a spectacular price point.

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