Broadway Plaza

Wow. What a primer/teaser for what's possible with today's DSLR's. I'm cutting my teeth shooting one-time performances exploding in front of me (i.e."organic blocking") at 2.0 following focus fully manual to keep up with the actors. Whew! Too much fun. Thanks for footage to aspire to...

Hi Marco, very informative article. I had a couple of follow up questions.
After having a chance to test out the 7D I noted a heat warning coming on with an icon of a temperature gauge. For how long can you shoot the camera without turning it off, and and or at what point will it overheat.
Your videos were smoothed out by slowing them down slightly, I did notice on my tests that the pans and tilts looked slightly jerky no matter how smooth I made them. Is this part of the problem with the downsize sampling?
It also seemed to me that in contrasty situations the blacks were somewhat crushed. Do you have any idea what the f stop latitude is and at what point you start seeing any grain in the image when you boost the ASA rating.
Also is there an editing work around since FCP does not like the compression codec of H264 for editing as the image play back slightly gerky.
Thanks, your insight would be appreciated.
Nick Blair March 17, 2010

Thanks for the nice comments, Nick. To answer some questions:

- I haven't had any overheating issues with my 5D2, so I wouldn't know what might be wrong with your 7D. There seems to be some units out there (5D2/7D) that have had overheating issues, so if it's frequently problematic for you, I'd take it to your nearest Canon Service Center.

- Unfortunately you wont really get better/smoother pans and tilts when scaling down the video. It's ideal to use a well made fluid head for your tripod. When shooting video with these cameras, a traditional photo tripod isn't the best solution if you have a choice. And yes, if you shoot at 30 FPS and conform to 24 FPS like this video, it too will help smooth things out. That is, if you don't need the audio to go with it!

- The imager noise level differs between the 7D and 5D2. The 5D2 has a much larger sensor and as such can record at higher ISOs with lower noise artifacts. This is one of the main reasons users choose to spend the extra money on the full-frame sensor over the 1.6X cropped sensor. Also, regarding crushed blacks and high contrast, it's imperative (at least with the 5D2) to not use the default picture profile, which boosts saturation and contrast by default. If you make the profile more linear (lower the contrast and saturation), then you will avoid crushed blacks and/or blown whites, giving you a little more latitude in post for color-timing and such.

- Yeah, editing in the native H.264 format is strongly discouraged for it's choppy action. Instead, batch-transcode to ProRes before you edit, then use those ProRes files and you'll be a happy camper. Additionally, if you transcode to 10-bit 4:2:2 ProRes HQ, you might get a hair more latitude when color-timing to help reduce noise and artifacts.

Nice tip about going from 30fps to 24fps and how that slows down and smooths out the video. A quick question regarding the article in the print edition, page 18. At the top is a picture of you with a HDSLR on a vest/steadicam rig, which steadicam are you using there?
Steve