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Steven Dempsey

Shooting video with the Canon 5D Mark II... a review	3votes
May 02, 2009 06:11 PM	Views: 9887 Favorited: 0 Comments: 9

	Filed Under: Equipment review
Tags: Canon 5D Mark II

I decided to write more of a personal experience narrative with the Canon 5D Mark II rather than a typical review. I’m much more interested in how the camera works for me and what and how it can capture images rather than getting hung up on technical details. For that kind of information, there is an abundance of information already out there on the Web.

I have done my best to keep everything accurate but it is possible that I may have referred to something erroneously. If that is the case, please feel free to correct me.

A New Paradigm

When Shiv asked me to review the new Canon 5D Mark II, I jumped at the chance. Nikon began this new trend of DSLRs capable of shooting HD video with the D90 but Canon upped the stakes somewhat with their own higher resolution version. I had read lots of articles already online and was eager to try out the Mark II for myself.

I’m going to mostly focus on the video capabilities of the 5D Mark II but I will mention a few things about the photo side also.

One of the reasons I love capturing images is that I always see the world with such wonder but I also have a special gratitude to the great minds that have produced the technology that allows me to capture what I'm seeing. The technology itself has come leaps and bounds over the past few years. Maybe I'm getting old but I remember When you consider the cumbersome methods that were available only 20 years ago to process a photo or create a video, you can really appreciate the absolute convenience we all enjoy today with fast computers and technology that allows us to see the results of our work almost immediately.

The Canon 5D Mark II is primarily a still camera but the video capability is more than a mere novelty. With a little patience and knowledge of its limitations, the camera is capable of capturing beautifully sharp motion pictures. For those looking to forgo the 35mm adapter paradigm and use a DSLR for filmmaking, however, you might want to just hold off on that...at least for now.

The race is on to see who can produce the definitive HD/DSLR camera. The Nikon D90 can capture 24p images but only at 720p whereas the Canon 5D Mark II can capture 1920 x 1080 resolution but only at 30p.

24p may be a deal breaker for many people, including myself, but there is so much more to consider than simple frame rates. Even though I'm curious I am not going to compare the Nikon and Canon because I haven’t had a chance to use the Nikon for testing purposes.

Shooting Stills

The 5D Mark II is a remarkable DSLR. The images it captures are breathtaking. Resolution is very important to me because I like to shoot landscapes and the camera’s huge 21mpx resolution (for stills) is not lacking at all. I shot a photograph of some people about a hundred feet away in a field of daffodils through a closed car window while the car was moving and the results were still sharp and full of detail. I can see things in the resulting photos that are not even visible to the naked eye.

The lowlight ability is also impressive. I have gotten more than acceptable shots in near dark situations cranking the ISO up to 3200 and above. The grain is fine and feels organic.

The 3” LCD is a delight, to say the least. With a 920,000 dot resolution, it is crystal clear and can make shooting all the more fun. The brightness varies via an ambient light sensor. It is quite visible in direct sunlight and it won’t burn your eyes out when you are in subdued practical light. This is nice for judging exposure. One word of caution, though, be sure to put some kind of protective film over the LCD surface. Mine got scratched up pretty easily. I recommend "Invisible Shield".

Shooting DSLR Video Footage

What attracted me most was the idea of having a compact camera that could shoot footage theoretically of better quality than my video camera/35mm adapter combo. I had already seen the huge difference that direct lens/camera connection (as opposed to going through ground glass) can make when I shot with a RED ONE recently. The bokeh is wonderful, the out of focus specular highlights display a solid circle or oval with no diffused artifacts typically associated with 35mm adapter usage.

I live by a lake and there was a bit of a territorial war going on outside between three Canadian geese. I decided to shoot some video with the 5D to see how it looked. Getting the camera to shoot video is not very intuitive, at least initially. I had to go into the menu and enable live preview, select a couple of other things and then press a button at the upper left of the LCD and then I had to hit another button to start recording. I held it towards my subjects and realized quickly that this is not a camera you shoot handheld. Every movement of my hands and arms was very noticeable in the footage. I even tried to anchor myself against a wall while sitting but that only helped a little. No matter, I thought, this is just a test so I continued recording. (Ironically, most of the example video I shot is handheld.)

When I was done, I fumbled at a few knobs until I figured out how to review the footage (yes I know I should RTFM, but I usually like to fiddle with stuff until I hit a brick wall). It looked good and the tiny little speaker in the camera gave me an idea of the sound recorded. This wasn’t very exciting because it was mainly my heavy breathing as I tried to concentrate and keep the camera balanced.

A Quick Post Production Test

I sat down at my computer and launched Adobe Premiere CS3. I use the Cineform plug-in AspectHD to edit my XHA1 footage so I decided to set up a 30p 1440x1080 project to take a look at the footage. I didn’t really have another project setting that would enable me to see the footage on the timeline play fluidly.

I transferred the QuickTime files off the 16GB Compact Flash card and opened the files in Premiere from my hard drive. Everything imported fine. The first thing I noticed was that the footage was very contrasty. There was almost no information in the shadows because the blacks were crushed. This also gave the footage a very saturated look and it was biased towards blue. Later I learned that I have control over how the picture looks in a series of editable presets. Right now, though, I was most concerned with how the moving image looked in terms of resolution and motion cadence.

After a brief render, I hit the enter key and sat back. The footage had a video look to it as I expected but it also looked like it was shot with a very slow shutter speed. This didn't make sense to me because I shot it in broad sunlight. All moving things had a motion trail that looked ugly to me.

Actually, the first thing I thought about was that frame blending was turned on. Sure enough, when I took a look, that’s exactly what was going on. In Premiere, frame blending is automatically enabled when you speed up or slow down footage. I hadn’t done either so it was confusing to me why the footage came in this way. I have not tried importing it into any other kind of project settings so I’m not sure if that was just a Cineform quirk or if it’s something with the h.264 codec. I didn’t notice the frame blending look when I played the files directly in the QuickTime player.

I disabled frame blending on each of the files on the timeline and re-rendered. This time it looked fine. I was impressed with the resolution. It certainly looked as good as my XHA1 and the footage had a very natural and organic look to it.

Image Quality

So what about the overall image quality? I found it to be very sharp and held detail quite well on the horizon in distant landscape shots. In some other tests, however, I noticed, for example, with car grills or patterns with parallel lines, a moiré pattern does appear. There are also some stairstepping issues in diagonals. It appears more in high contrast shots than in those more evenly lit. These problems are mostly not noticeable though, and the camera produces a very vibrant and true HD image.

The low light capability is exceptional. The ISO can be pushed more than I’ve seen in any other camera with better grain definition. The results of my low light tests were better than I have seen in even the most sensitive prosumer Sony cameras. One of the things Canon does well is make digital noise appear more like film grain than the big bouncing blotches I've seen with other cameras.

The Mark II shoots 1080p with an h.264 compression at up to 38mbps as opposed to HDV’s lower bitrate of 25mbps. Because the footage is recorded onto a Compact Flash card, the maximum single file size is 4GB which translates to about 12 minutes of footage. I think this is mostly adequate unless you are shooting long-form timelapse shots.

Focus Challenges

Working with 35mm lenses in general takes a lot of practice to get right, particularly with a combination of shallow depth of field and sharp focus. So in my meager shooting of the Death Star battle between the waterfowl outside, I overshot the focusing and it caused my subjects to be soft. Had I shot the same scene with a regular video camera, the wide depth of field would have given me acceptable sharpness where I needed it.

Why not use autofocus, I thought? While it’s great for shooting stills, the autofocus is way too slow to be useful shooting a moving image.

So now the limitations of shooting video on this DSLR are apparent to me. Where I am shooting fairly static things, I set the camera up in regular still mode with autofocus on. I then focus my subject and switch to manual focus so it’s locked. I then go into video mode and begin shooting. I’m sure people have other methods of doing this but it’s what works for me. When my subject is acting predictably in my frame, I get great results. Of course it should be said that with practice, you can make this work by keeping the lens on manual focus. I have learned to do the same thing using my 35mm adapter.

Form Factor Challenges

What is awkward is the fact that you are looking at the LCD at an angle that’s completely inflexible, unlike a video camera. So you either have to keep the camera pretty high on a tripod so that you can see the LCD at eye level while adjusting the focus or you will find yourself crouched down to see the picture which can make it cumbersome to adjust the focus ring. What I’m trying to say is that it has taken eons to develop the form factor we now associate with video and film cameras. Adjustable viewfinders and flip out and twist around LCDs do all that articulating for a reason.

There are companies out there who saw these shortcomings and developed support systems and extensions and accessories all in the name of making this a better device for filmmakers. While I admire their efforts, I can’t help feeling like it’s gotten a little over the top and has strayed far from the original intent of the camera. It’s supposed to be something you can pick up and start shooting almost right away. What it has become for some people is the opposite. Now it has a moveable plate at the bottom, a rail system, and an articulated arm for an external monitor, a battery pack for counterbalance and “convenience” and a follow focus in the front and finally a matte box that’s almost 4 times the size of the camera. Because of all this added weight, the rig has to go on a heavy duty tripod.

Okay, I’m sorry, where’s the DSLR in all of this? I can’t even see the camera anymore and it has now become as cumbersome and inconvenient as a film camera or a video/35mm adapter system. It also takes the same amount of people to operate and the spontaneity that I found so attractive about it in the first place has completely disappeared.

In this scenario, I have to ask myself, why not just use a video camera with a 35mm adapter? The footage is not that different to justify working with all the limitations of a DSLR.

Controlling Your Image or Lack Thereof

Speaking of limitations, let’s talk about that for a second. From a personal standpoint, I like as much control as possible over my image when I shoot. If I have to move the camera from left to right and there is a slight light differential, I do not want the exposure of my camera to fluctuate. I also don’t want to change the shutter speed of my camera once I have established where I want it. Shutter speed can be very influential in the motion cadence of your footage and I certainly don’t want it wandering during a single shot. Same goes for gain…I want to keep it off unless I’m shooting in very lowlight situations which I tend to avoid at all costs. So basically, I want to shoot completely manual. Manual = Control.

Shoot with the 5D Mark II and you will realize that you have littler or no control over the exposure of your image. The camera will do a good job at keeping your image exposed correctly but it will not allow you to make any decisions of your own.

The 5D Mark II will not allow you to control your iris setting, your shutter speed or your ISO level. It shoots almost completely automatic much like a consumer video camera (without the aforementioned autofocus). Unless you are shooting in an environment where you have complete control over your lighting and, even at that, it has to be consistent to avoid exposure shifts; it would be madness to shoot anything serious…in my opinion.

For every problem, there is a workaround and there are many people on the Web who have workarounds for gaining more control over the exposure. For instance, if you turn your Canon lens slightly (essentially disconnecting communication with the camera), you can lock the lens’s iris setting. Also, if you use a Nikon or other brand lens, you can also have control over the iris setting.

That’s all well and good but it doesn’t give you control over the other biggies of exposure, namely shutter and ISO. While you could lock your lens to, say, f2.8 the shutter speed is going to fluctuate as you pan or tilt into slightly different exposure situations. The camera may also choose to change a combination of ISO and shutter speeds. There’s just no way of telling and it really depends on the degree your light shifts in a scene. Some people have also figured out how to fool the camera into locking ISO but I seriously don’t want to have to deal with all of these workarounds on a shoot.

But the most serious problem with this camera if you are going to be shooting it for a film look is the lack of control of depth of field. It’s not complete lack of control though, so let me explain.

As already mentioned, you can lock the iris in your lens by either twisting it so it breaks the communication between lens and camera or you can buy an adapter ring and use another brand of manual lens for full control. This is really the only way to predictably use a particular measure of depth of field.

In full auto mode, the camera will give you a nice shallow depth of field if you are in a low light situation where the camera is forced to open the iris as far as it will go. If, however, you are shooting a scene in full sunlight, the camera will close the iris down to f16 or something like that which will force a much wider depth of field and thus negating the effect you are looking for. Many workarounds will help you gain more control, including putting a stack of ND filters in front of the lens. I don’t know about you but that’s not what I want to add to my already large list of things to do on a shoot.

Audio Limitations

If there’s one aspect of the video function which is almost pure novelty, it’s the sound. There is a built in microphone at the top of the camera but the resulting sound is not only tinny, it also picks up every slight movement you might make focusing the lens or changing the focal length, etc. You can also attach an external stereo microphone but with no XLR inputs, I wouldn’t use it for even ambient sound.

So Who Is This Camera For?

With the limitations I have mentioned, you must be asking yourself who would find this camera useful to shoot video. Well actually, there are plenty of situations in which the 5D Mark II would be quite useful.

Take my own needs, for instance. One of the things I like to do is shoot footage for stock and submit it to multiple libraries online. There is an equal demand for 24p and 30p footage so not having the ability to shoot 24p with the Canon is not necessarily a handicap in this case. Shooting things like waterfalls or landscapes where the light is fairly broad and predictable and there’s not too much camera movement is also quite doable and can give some great results.

Getting shots in places where larger cameras would be impractical is also an advantage. There are plenty of users who just shoot video for fun, even if they have a more exacting standard than your average consumer who could easily find the 5D quite useful.

If you are looking to get some great shots of your family and friends or of vacations you take or even some B-Roll for a documentary or music video, etc., etc., you can get great useable footage.

Conclusion

It’s hard to give a definitive opinion about the Canon 5D Mark II. This is definitely a new technology and I believe the camera will probably become outdated quite fast because things are developing so rapidly. Even as I write, Panasonic has released their first DSLR/HD hybrid. It has addressed some of the limitations I have mentioned but it has compromises in other areas, mainly resolution. As usual, it’s all about figuring out what limitations you can live with. In some ways, the current crop of DSLR/HD video cameras feel like they have popped out of the novel Frankenstein, where the mad inventor has created something that still needs a lot of work before its perfected. (Okay, it's not going to wreek havoc on the townspeople so maybe that's not such a good simile). The video functionality does not feel like it’s ready for primetime in terms of being appropriate to everyone’s needs.

One positive side effect for me is that it has really tweaked my interest in photography like never before. But I don’t ever look at my Canon XHA1/Ultimate combo and think the 5D Mark II is going to replace it. Far from it, in fact, but maybe in the not too distant future things will have changed enough to make it a viable option. Until then, I’m happy to use the more traditional method to shoot my video footage.

Pros:

Beautiful 1080p images

Huge 3” high resolution LCD

High quality bokeh and 35mm look without artifacts

Solid state recording on relatively cheap media

Can shoot in places you otherwise couldn’t with a larger camera

Interchangeable high quality lenses

Great low light capability

Cons:

No 24p recording

Microphone quality is very low

No manual exposure when recording video

Moire pattern in some shots with close parallel lines

Some stairstepping in high contrast diagonals

DSLR form factor not so good for video work

Example footage here:

Low light shooting with the Canon 5D Mark !!

Canon 5D Mark II Video - Shots I can't get with a bigger camera and exposure shifting

Canon 5D Mark II Bokeh Test

Comments

Glenn Thomas

May 04, 2009 11:33 AM

Great review

Hi Steven,

The big question is, will you be keeping this camera? :)

Also, would I be correct in assuming that due to the exposure being fully automatic, obtaining a really shallow depth of field in sunny conditions would be difficult to achieve in most cases?

Some guys I know had a music video shot by a professional photographer using the 5D II and posted it on Youtube. Now I hate to say it, but it looked horrible. Disregarding the really wide lens that had been used, the overall look was more like what you'd expect from a cheap camera phone. No shallow DOF (mostly due to the lens I'd assume), lots of overblown white areas in half the shots, and some serious rolling shutter artifacts. Of course the Youtube compression didn't help either. Which leads me to believe a LOT of care needs to be taken when using this camera.

I've seen some of the rigs you mentioned and agree they're a bit out of control. The Zacuto one especially. Wrapping something like that around a camera with no manual control, a video framerate, lack of audio input, and rolling shutter issues just doesn't make sense to me. That said, I'm sure they'll sell a bundle of those things for as long as these cameras are the flavour of the month.

The Panasonic GH1 looks impressive with it's manual control and flip out LCD. Although with the 2x crop factor, I'd need to buy some extra fast and expensive wide angle lenses just to get to close to the look I'm already achieving with my HV20 & SG Pro combination. The 17mbps bit rate would be a concern as well, unless that could be improved upon using Cineform. Definitely a nice camera nonetheless, but still not good enough to make me want to give up my current rig.

Adrian Frearson

May 06, 2009 09:11 AM

Steven,
Liked the review. As helpful sometimes as it is to see exposure charts and technical data, it still doesn't really give me a real understanding of how a camera will work in a given situation or a feel for the image that the camera produces. With this review I find it more telling of what to expect from the camera in the real world and how it sits along side some of the other tools we have available.

I've got a shoot coming up in a couple of months time, which involves some very low light shooting. I think that the Canon looks like it might be the best choice for this, provided I can spend some time with it before hand.

Cheers

Adrian

Will Mahoney

May 15, 2009 08:32 AM

Great one.

Great review, Mr. Dempsey. When can we see another short?

Chas Briggs

November 16, 2009 09:28 PM

this needs to be updated

Your review should be updated now that the mark II has a firmware update to make shooting video all manual control.

Great review, i would like to see the geese video you shot

jin long

February 26, 2010 02:41 AM

BINGO!

STUDY AND AD

Bob Hooper

July 07, 2010 02:00 PM

Owner/Editor

I understand some of your cons but Canon added 24p shooting back in March of '10 with the 2.0.4 upgrade. It added some other additions to the control of the camera you seem to be unfamiliar with. I was shooting 24p with my 5D Mark II in March of 2010. You seem to be accurate in this article at the time it was written but you need to update your information. thanks,

Eugen P

November 18, 2010 07:44 AM

Shooting longer then 12 minutes

I am totally in love with this camera! I am considering buying but I understand that it has a limitation of max 12 minutes of video recording. Is there any way to make it record longer then that? Thank you eugen

Barry Gray

June 05, 2011 04:44 PM

thanks Steven, I rented the 5D this weekend to get a feel for it before purchasing.....I was a little frustrated and came across your review, and it was great to hear that someone else was having the same experience that I was......I agree completely that this camera produces stunning video (especially in low light) mainly due to the cinematic depth of field that is accomplished in this particular setting. Otherwise, it is clunky and terrible as a hand held. I need a camera to make a documentary and it became clear very quickly that this is not the camera for this use. With a documentary, you need a video camera that auto focuses quickly, gets great sound, and has a LCD that you can view from your hip. When you are focusing on story, you can't be fiddling around with camera settings. But I am intrigued by this camera still!! I will keep my eye on this and once the settings are more fully manual, I would be very interested to purchase for use in making short films, music videos, and video art. Cheers!!!

Patricia Sowers

January 29, 2012 05:45 PM

Potential problems with audio and 12 minute filming limit??

Sir: Like a previous writer, I also am interested in making a documentary which will primarily be in the form of indoor interviews and some outdoor shots. I am very concerned about the 12 minute limitation. This would create a real problem if the interviewee were in the middle of a sentence. No amount of editing would correct that problem. Is there any way that the filming time constraint can be changed? Also, I would naturally use an external microphone and recorder. Will there be a problem with the post production phase in synchronizing the sound with the image? I've been advised that this can be a big problem. Like a previous writer, I'm very close to purchasing this camera but I need to get clear answers before I ake the plunge. Thank you. Patricia Sowers