What should I buy?

UPDATE: See below for thoughts on the Rebel T2i.

Many people ask me which camera they should buy. It’s a question I duck and dodge like Steven Seagal.

People have also told me that they “eagerly await my review of the Canon 7D.” Which strikes me as odd, given that I’ve never reviewed a camera in my life.

I bought a 7D. I don’t buy things to try them out. I’m not a tech journalist or someone who gets review units of new cameras. I’m a self-unemployeed filmmaker who spent his own money on it, and I’m happy with my purchase. It’s cheap by the measure of the type of video cameras I like, and it uses the same lenses that I habitually collect for my still photography.

Does the announcement of the pending firmware update to the 5D Mark II sully that happiness at all? Maybe it would if Canon was releasing it now, but since it’s a ways off, it just reminds me that I should not have bought the 7D if I didn’t have an immediate need for it. It’s a nice kick in the pants to keep shooting.

So what should you buy? If you are interested in DSLRs and have an immediate need, my recommendation is the 7D. It’s affordable, will get you on the trail of some nice lenses, and you get a free flagship-of-the-line APS-C stills camera in every box. Handy for PR stills.

I’ve prepared a 2-page Canon 7D Cine Kit store page for your convenience. Shopping there puts you in the Stu-owes-you-a-beer queue.

You could buy a 5D Mark II and wait for the firmware, miserably shooting 30p in the meantime. That sounds pretty silly to me—unless stills are more important to you than video. To me, there’s nothing like a full-frame DSLR for shooting stills. I loved my original 5D and I’ve learned to love my 5D Mark II as much. But don’t buy a camera based on what it might someday become. Buy the camera that you needed yesterday. If you’re reading this blog you know that 24p, like pants, is not optional. So for the time being, the 5D is not a great choice.

Also remember that all indications are that the 5D will get 24 and 25p, but not the 720p 50 and 60 fps modes that the 7D and 1D Mark IV have.

UPDATE: Looks like that’s not true—Canon revealed that the 5D Mark II will get all of the 7D’s frame rates.

UPDATE UPDATE: And now it looks like that’s not the case.

Ah yes, the 1D Mark IV. Should you buy that? For $5,000? That sounds expensive, but it’s what I paid for my first DV camera (the Sony VX1000 baby), which had no 24p and was, if I recall correctly, powered by steam or possibly wood. Of course, it came with a lens. The Mark IV is most assuredly $5,000 worth of stills camera body, but it’s not $5,000 worth of video camera. It has amazing low-light performance and greatly reduced rolling shutter artifacting, but it still struggles to resolve detailed scenes without nasty aliasing and color fringing, and lacks professional audio inputs. It can’t auto-focus while recording video and makes manually focussing difficult. Just like the 5D and 7D.

So unless you need to shoot in the dark and have money to spare (or are also a photojournalist who traffics in 1D bodies), I’d turn your attention back to the 7D. Convenient shopping page here. Beer owed.

Or, heck, you could go crazy and buy a “video camera.” Word on the street is that they’re damn good at shooting video. If rolling shutter really bums you out, check out the last great CCD camera, the Panasonic HMC150. It has all the same frame rates as the 7D, and get this: it’s designed to shoot video.

I’m sure someone will point out that you could wait and buy a Scarlet, or something else cool and unreleased. But this post isn’t called “What camera should I wait for, failing to do any filmmaking in the process.” I respect that RED is taking its time. We’ll talk about RED when there’s something to talk about.

So without further ado, here’s my long awaited review of the Canon 7D: Buy one, and be so busy using it that you don’t have time to talk about it. That’s my plan.

Update on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 6:07PM by Stu

A commented asked about the Panasonic GH1. I wish that camera was on this list. One of the reasons it was easy to impulse-buy the 7D was that I’d already mentally spent the money on a GH1 months prior. I praised Panasonic for taking video seriously in a hybrid camera. Then I saw how nasty the compression was on the 24p files and I completely lost the loving feeling. I have a half-written tough-love post about it (tentative title is GH1: DOA, snappy, eh?). Between the harsh compression, the what-year-is-it-anyway 3:2 pulldown, and the slow kit lens, the GH1 is a big disapointment to this die-hard Panasonic fan.

Update on Friday, February 26, 2010 at 1:20PM by Stu

I could probably write this article all over again now that the Canon Rebel T2i, AKA the 550D has arrived. Basically the same video functions as the 7D, in a cheap plastic body for half the price.

Read more about the Rebel here, or check out the Rebel Starter Kit at the ProLost store.

Is there still a reason to buy the 7D over the Rebel? I think if you had both cameras in front of you, the answer would be clear. There’s no comparison in build quality, weather sealing, and “feel” between Canon’s Rebel offerings and the 7D, which is the flagship camera in Canon’s APS-C line and is built like a tank. But if you never use the camera for stills, and don’t mind the budget body, the 550D is an amazing deal.

NOCTURNE Behind-The-Scenes

This and other screen-grabs from the upcoming behind-the-scenes video of Nocturne give you a sense of what the light was like at our location. Here we’re about to make a run on the GripTrix for the loading dock scene. Although the 5D Mark II can barely make us out, I ultimately wound up darkening the ID Mark IV’s shots for the final grade.

Read more on Vincent’s blog, and watch for his post with the behind the scenes video.

I will post something soon about our post workflow.

You can put the boom box down now — 24p on your 5D

When it rains it pours.

Mike Seymour just posted that Canon has announced a firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II that will support 24p and 25p at 1920x1080.

“We understand that EOS 5D Mark II users desire additional frame rates and we’re preparing a firmware update to allow the camera to shoot at both 24P and 25P,” said Chris Macleod, Brand Manager – EOS, Canon Australia.

Canon expects the firmware update to be available in the first half of 2010 and will release more details as they become available.

Whew.

Read the full story over at fxguide.

Update on Monday, October 19, 2009 at 10:46PM by Stu

Readers of this blog, y’all should pat yourselves on the back for this one. This is a great example of a big behemoth of a company hearing its users and responding. Well done.

So here’s the state of HDDSLRs: Amazon has the 5D Mark II in stock now for $2780, the 7D in stock for $1900 (short wait for $1700), and the 1D Mark IV available for pre-order for $5000.

And we’re only 10 days away from new announcments from RED.

Like watching supermodels mudwrestle for the chance to give you a backrub.

NOCTURNE and the Canon 1D Mark IV

See It Bigger on SmugMug (full 1080p!) HERE.

Two weeks ago Vincent Laforet emailed me with a cryptic request to join him in shooting a follow-up to his short film Reverie, the short that started the avalanche of excitement over DSLRs that oh-by-the-way happen to shoot video. I was flattered, but found myself thinking “Does the world need another Reverie?” What I didn’t know was that Vincent had just had his mind blown by a new prototype camera that Canon had sent him, and his mind was racing with ideas for how to put it to work.

I met up with him in LA and saw the camera. Yes, the world needed to see what thing thing could do.

The camera was, of course, the Canon 1D Mark IV. It’s the first of Canon’s professional 1D line to feature HD video recording. The Mark IV joins the I-get-tired-just-typing-the-numbers crazy-high ISO club, maxing out at a ridiculous 102,400. This insane low-light capability extends to video recording as well. The 1D Mark IV is an HD camera that can see more in low light than your eye can, recording usable video at up to ISO 6400.

On our Friday night location scout I took a break from giggling like a dork every time I pointed the camera down a dark street only to discover a supernova of illumination on the LCD, and asked the burning questions: Sensor? 1.3 crop. Aliasing? Still present. Autofocus? Not while recording.

So the Mark IV is an evolutionary step in the HDDSLR race. It doesn’t tick too many things off my wish list. Where it is revolutionary is in its low-light performance. And it has by far the least rolling-shutter shear of any DSLR I’ve ever held.

To hold it in your hand, you’d never know the 1D Mark IV has video. The body is exactly the same as that of its predecessor. After the 7D’s barrage of new buttons, including dedicated video start-stop, the Mark IV is a spare and spartan affair. My theory is that Canon doesn’t want to risk tripping up the muscle memory of its pro customers, many of whom still take this whole “photography” thing fairly seriously.

(For my part, owning a 5D Mark II and a 7D, operating the Mark IV pushed me into the schitzo zone. Now no matter which Canon HDDSLR I pick up I fumble with the controls and press the wrong thing.)

Two Nights, No Lights

Me hand-holding with a Zeiss prime (having donated my shoes to actor Mark Smith for the loading dock sequence), GripTrix driver Aaron Hummel, and Vincent with his ATM Gyro rig

Our mission was simple: We’d shoot for two nights in downtown LA, with whatever gear we could swing and no permits, and only with available light. We “lit” our scenes though careful location scouting and blocking. We shot in locations that were so dark that we could barely see. In fact, on our second night, a “real” film shoot moved in next to us under the 6th Street bridge, and they brought with them a massive truck with a crane-mounted stadium light array of nine HMIs to shoot the area we’d just left.

So let me say this clearly: This camera alleviates concerns over quantities of light. It’s still up to you to supply—or find—the quality of light.

Here are some random notes:

• It’s one thing to shoot a film in two nights, but its another thing entirely to post it in a week. Editor Benjamin Nussbaum at Pictures in a Row is a total rock star. He took our hectic collection of footage and made it sing. If you need your shit cut good, go to Pictures in a Row. Seriously.
• I was all WTF? about the 1.3 crop, But Vincent reminded me that in the pro line, the 1D model has always been APS-H and the 1Ds series is full-frame. Still, we wound up fiddling with prime lens choices more than we might with a more familiar sensor size.
• The reduced size of the sensor is considered in the stills world to be a worthwhile compromise in the name of faster frame rates. The equivalency in HD video might be sensor read-out times, because the rolling-shutter nastiness was so minimal that we did not shy away from Bourne-cam, whip-pans, and scrolling backgrounds.
• Speaking as someone who owns a 5D Mark II and a 7D, it’s that last point that makes me most envious of the Mark IV. Seeing in the dark is cool, but not worrying about Jello-cam is even better.
• Vincent and I collaborated with a third co-director, David Nelson. Sharing directing duties is hard, but if you put real effort into the collaboration it can be very rewarding.
• We did color correct and lightly denoise the shots. When Reverie first hit, it was important to see “what the camera can do,” but now I think we’ve all matured a bit and are interested in how a new camera fits into a reasonable post pipeline.
• You can color correct a three-minute short in one night using After Effects and Colorista. Sunrises are pretty.

The inevitable question: Should you buy the Mark IV? It’s gonna be expensive, and the APS-H sensor feels like a rest-stop on the way to a 1Ds Mark IV with full frame (and possiby a million other things we want, according to rather optimistic rumors). I’m happy with my 7D, and hold out hope for a firmware update for my 5D Mark II (UPDATE: Holy shit!). I’ll hold off on buying a Mark IV.

Until the next time I feel like making a movie in the dark.

Be sure to read Vincent’s post here. Like I have to tell you that.

Update on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 1:13AM by Stu

John’s kind comment bellow remined me of a point I wanted to make. He described the short as looking “gritty and filmic,” and I take that as a huge compliment. We achived that in a number of ways, both creative and technical, but one simple technical rule helped in no small way: we limited ourselves to a 180 degree shutter. In other words, if we were shooting 24p, we used at least a 1/50 shutter—usually 1/60 to avoid flicker. When we shot 60p, we used a shutter of 1/125.

You may recall that my principal criticism of Reverie was that its wide-open shutter gave it the look of well-shot video.

Others have tried to use digital cinema cameras to capture the beauty of downtown Los Angeles at night, but they’ve always needed to open their elecronic shutter past 180 virtual degrees, and the results are a dead giveaway of video origination. The 1D Mark IV gave us the low-light performance we needed to stick to our guns on the 180 degree maximum shutter rule.

Update on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 9:32PM by Stu

Inexplicably, Canon has asked Vincent Laforet to remove Nocturne from his blog today. Vincent reminds us that “this happened last year [with Reverie] and all was fine a few days later.” So let’s hope that’s the case this time as well.

The SmugMug embed above worked for a while after the new but has finally died, it seems.