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.

Flatten Your 5D

Readers of The DV Rebel’s Guide know that I like to set up my cameras to record as much dynamic range as possible, resulting in a low-contrast, low-saturation “digital negative” that allows more flexibility for grading in post. If you’ve seen any video I’ve shot with the Canon 5D Mark II lately, whether in the Red Giant TV tutorial or on fxphd, you may have wondered how I set up the camera to achieve this. The answer comes in the form of some in-camera Picture Style settings.

I posted a while back about using Canon’s PictureStyleEditor software to create these custom Picture Styles. Since then I have found that the controls in the camera are more than sufficient for creating a more post-friendly look for the 5D’s video files.

Starting with the “Neutral” setting, I make the following modifications:

• Sharpness all the way down
• Contrast all the way down
• Saturation two notches down

Save that as on of your User Defined Picture Styles. Then, optionally, hop over to the Custom Function menu, select C.Fn II: Image, and enable Highlight Tone Priority.

UPDATE: Or don’t. See Update 1 below.

Your settings should look like this:

This will remove the contrasty, video-like tone curve from your future recordings, and eek out a little more highlight detail. Here’s a shot made with the default settings:

Video frame made with Standard Picture Mode, Highlight Tone Priority offHere’s that same shot with the Stu settings:

Prolost Settings

You can see the reduced contrast, the increase in shadow and highlight detail. It’s closer to a raw image with a linear tone curve. Zoom in and you can see the difference in highlight handling on the reflections:

Default settings — harsh, clipped highlightsProlost settings — smooth rolloff in the highlights, increased detailYou can also see the difference in sharpening artifacts. My settings reduce, but do not eliminate, the moiré effect endemic to the 5D Mark II’s line-skipping:

Default settingsProlost settings

You’re going to put all that contrast and most of that sharpening back in post of course, but in your own way, and with more control, and after any shot-to-shot evening out or clever power windows. The ability to design a “zeroed out” or CINE_LIKE-esque Picture Style is one of the things that makes the 5D Mark II’s video dangerously close to usable.

I recommend assigning this setting to one of your Custom notches on the mode dial, so that you don’t inflict these settings on your stills. They don’t affect raw files of course (UPDATE: That’s not actually true, see Update below), but they do get baked into the JPEG previews that accompany those raw files. I have the above settings registered as C3 (along with manual control and a 1/60th shutter), so I can quickly pop into my ideal movie capture settings.

Update on Friday, August 21, 2009 at 9:11AM by Stu

If you do set up your 5D as described above, make sure to do the last step with the custom function so that these settings only affect your video shooting. You probably don’t want to have Highlight Tone Priority on for your stills, especially if you shoot raw. What it does is “push” (reduce) your ISO setting by one stop, causing you to capture a full stop of additional highlight information through no more sophisticated means than simply underexposing. For video and JPEGs, that additional highlight range is non-linearly mapped into the image, creating a very film-like “shoulder.” For raw, it simply passes metadata to your raw decoder that may or may not be honored.

Lightroom, for example, interprets HTP as a simple instruction to boost exposure by one stop. Fair enough, except that this won’t match what you saw on the camera LCD at all. Blacks will be too crushed and that extra highlight detail will be missing (until you futz with the Develop controls to bring it back). Trying to bring more detail back into the blacks will bring in nasty noise that was not visible in the JPEG preview.

Underexposing to capture extra highlight info can be a fine idea, but it’s best implemented case-by-case, and in a predictable way.

Highlight Tone Priority hides the underexposure from you and might cause you to think you’re capturing a more robust negative than you really are.

But for video mode, it creates a more film-like low-contrast, high dynamic range image, with just a touch more noise from the one-stop push.

I now roll with two custom function settings, one with HTP on, one with it off. For daylight exteriors with plenty of light, HTP: On. For lower-light situations, or more controlled lighting, HTP: Off.

Update on Monday, August 24, 2009 at 2:09PM by Stu

There’s an interesting discussion of the nuances of HTP and ISO performance over at cinema5D.com. Interpret tests results such as these with caution though — as the OP says, he’s trying to show off the noise, so it’s not so much a real-world test as it is an attempt to learn more about what’s happening in the camera. Turns out there are some surprizing variations in noise preformance at different ISO settings, possibly having to do with some ISO settings being “virtual,” i.e. metadata offsets of native settings.