My letter to Canon

Photo by Benjamin Warde of me making this shot.

The person I spoke with at Canon’s help line did not give me the greatest sense of confidence in their ability to impart my 24p request, so I took reader prosckes’s advice and emailed Canon at customerfeedback@cits.canon.com:

Dearest Canon,

I am an author, filmmaker, and photographer. I use my 5D almost every day and own several video cameras as well (including one from Canon). The filmmaking community is very excited about the 5D MarkII’s HD video mode. It is a very important development that many, including myself, see as signifying an eventual loss of distinction between video and still cameras. It is wonderful that Canon is a part of this revolution.

I realize that despite the excitement surrounding this new capability, video is a “bonus” feature on the 5D MkII. Nevertheless, it’s a bonus feature that will sell some cameras. In my own case, the HD video feature would be enough for me to immediately upgrade from my current 5D to the MkII. Except for one crucial problem: the frame rate.

It was a natural choice to offer 30 fps video, as it roughly matches the broadcast frame rate in both the US and Japan. But we filmmakers would love to have the option of 24 fps. This is the frame rate of motion picture film. Until HD video cameras adopted this frame rate (which came to be known as 24p, the “p” standing for Progressive Scan), they were not taken seriously by the film industry.

Canon’s pro video division understands this, perhaps painfully. Canon was once the darling of the independent video community, but being late to the table with a real 24p video solution meant a lot of lost business to Panasonic and Sony. Now even very low-end Canon video cameras have 24p support, although Canon is still not perceived as a leader in this area.

And while the 5D MkII is in a different class than the Nikon D90 DSLR, the D90’s video mode, while only 720p and marred by motion artifacts, is 24 fps. This is important enough that many people are buying the D90 based on this feature alone. At the same time, Panasonic’s compact LX3 also features 24p video at 720p HD resolution. Other manufacturers know what Canon’s pro video division knows: 24p is a must-have option in an HD camera.

Meanwhile, Jim Jannard of RED is scrapping his plans for a much-anticipated $3,000 video camera, based, no doubt, on the sudden explosion of large-sensor motion options cropping up at or below that price point. He has thousands of potential customers waiting to buy whatever he makes instead.

You need to be as much of a leader in this exciting new movement in camera technology as you are in the DSLR world. Please add 24p support to the 5D MkII via a firmware update. If you do, I will upgrade immediately. If you don’t support 24p, someone else will, and my business and allegiance will go with them. This is a critical time for Canon to establish leadership and show an understanding of its users’ needs.

And now for some specifics: While 30 fps is useful, it would be better if the camera ran at 29.97 fps, the actual speed of NTSC video. Similarly, when I say 24p, I am really talking about 23.976 fps. In Europe, users will want a 25 fps mode for compatibility with PAL video. Again, none of this is news to your pro video division.

For more information on this subject and to read some comments from supporters and potential customers, please see my blog:

So Close Canon

OK guys, if you’re serious about this…

Thanks for your time and attention,

-Stu

—
Stu Maschwitz
www.theorphanage.com
www.prolost.com

Dear Canon, 24p Please

Reader Eugenia commented on my last post (the 60th comment!) that she’d called Canon’s product feedback line and politely requested a choice of HD video frame rates on the 5D MarkII. If you care about 24p support on the 5D and would like to see it added in a future firmware update, please do the same.

Eugenia wrote:

I called (800) 828-4040, for the US. I pressed then the 3rd option, and the guy was set up to take feedback immediately…

She requested both 24 and 25 fps modes, as well as the NTSC speeds of 29.97 and 23.976 fps. I plan on simply requesting 23.976, and mentioning that as an owner of the original 5D, this feature alone would be enough to make me upgrade immediately.

Please do call and make your voice heard. This blog has gotten a record number of visits and comments in the last few days. There are definitely enough of us who care about this to catch Canon’s attention.

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So Close Canon

The 5D MkII has been officially announced, and the features match most of what was rumored, including a 1080p movie mode.

At 30 frames per second.

Remember how I said how stunning it was that Nikon chose 24 fps for the D90’s D-Movies? How it could have so easily been anything else? How if Canon came out with a movie-shooting DSLR that shot 30p I’d be less than thrilled?

Well it’s worse than that. Because a 5D that shot 24p at full HD resolution would have been a very important camera. For Canon to have come so close and botched that one detail is almost unbearable.

Maybe we can get Canon to offer a 24 fps mode in a future firmware update. Someone point me at Canon’s headquarters. I need to stand on their lawn with a boombox over my head.

UPDATE: Featured Comment from Joe:

I sometimes think that Canon has a pathological fear of true 24P. They have avoided serious contention to be the Indy filmmaker’s video camera year after year because of this.

30P is not only useless in relation to 24P (and film) -
it is actually dangerous.

DSLR Movies, Pros and Cons

In my new tradition of rambling on about a subject only to post again a few days later with a more succinct summary of my thoughts, here’s a quick rundown of why you should be excited about shooting video with your DSLR, and why you should reserve some modicum of wait-and-see caution.

First, the reasons to get excited, ranging from the obvious to the more obvious: 

• In the case of the D90, what a sweet deal. $1,000 for the body. I paid nearly that for my HV20. The real win here is that a resolution that is low to medium for a DSLR is positively overkill for HD. Nikon’s “bargain” SLR is overqualified by a mile for 720p video.
• Use your DSLR lenses. If the 5D MkII (or whatever) shoots video too, then both Nikon and Canon peeps can rejoice about this one. A big drawback of the RED One is the expense of the lenses (which need to be top-notch), and a perceived drawback of next year’s Scarlet is the fixed lens.
• A big-ass sensor. The D90’s sensor is roughly the size of the RED One’s. The rumored 5D MarkII’s is way bigger. That means more control of depth-of-field and more predictable results from your stable of lenses. It also means that a $1,000 camera is now making images that, at web resolutions, look an awful lot like those from much more expensive kit.
• 24p. I’m still reeling from this one, but somehow the D90’s video wound up being 24 fps. Hallelujah. It so easily could have been anything else.

And now the reasons to reserve judgement:

• 720p only, at least in the case of the D90. Personally I love 720p, but it’s quite a subset of what your DSLR can do.
• 24p. And that’s all, on the D90 anyway. No overcranking or undercranking. And who knows what frame rates other DSLRs will offer. A camera on which video is an afterthought is not likely to offer a wealth of options here.
• CMOS. CMOS roll. Roll MOS roll. Are DSLR chips, which have never had to fear shearing, skewing and wobbling from rolling shutters (mechanical shutters negate this), going to fare well when recording video? Or will they be jello-cams?
• Limited running time. Aparently there’s some red-tape reason why the D90 is restructed to five minutes of video. Those five minutes will still cost you about 600MB.
• No external audio input. But the D90 does have a mic. You’ll be dual-systeming it. Fortunately there’s cool software out there for syncing audio based on waveform matching.
• Manual control. Although things look good for the D90, the thing about shooting video is that you need the same kind of quick access to key manual exposure controls that SLR stills shooters require. But will the video options be ghettoized in a deep menu?
• Manual focus. Not in and of itself a problem, since that’s how pro video and film gets shot, but that LCD screen won’t be reliable for critical focus at HD res. HD cameras have handy focus-assist features like edge enhancement and LCD zoom.
• You’ll be at the mercy of a codec. The D90 scores well here on paper, but you are still dealing with heavy (and inefficient) compression of a baked-in color palette that may not respond well to agressive grading, as tends to be the case with perceptual compression. This is a tough thing to swallow when you’re holding in your hands a camera that lives and breaths raw formats for stills. Maybe someday someone will make a DSLR that lays down CinemaDNG sequences. Maybe? How about Please God Yes.
• But maybe worse than baked-in color and codecs, you’re at the mercy of whatever the camera can muster in realtime debayering. Most video from compact cameras looks bad not because of compression but because of the hasty techniques used to rapidly build an image from a tiny subset of the sensor’s photosites. I offer up my beloved LX2 as an example—its videos may be 848x480 on disk, but what’s actually present in the images is far less resolution than that. This hard-to-quantify factor could be the real pitfall, although none of the (heavily recompresed) D90 sample vids I’ve seen have exhibited egregious demosaicing artifacts.

I said I’d stop hypothesizing, but this is an interesting enough subject that I felt it was worth clearing the air about both why this thrilling new trend in DSLRs is so great, and why it’s not as great as one might hope.

UPDATE: Mike commented below with a link to dpreview’s sample D-Movies. If you download the original AVI files you can see some sizzle and color sparkle that is symptomatic of the expedient debayering I describe above.