Canon.
OK so for sometime now my geek of a brother has been getting hot under the collar for the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Not that it takes much to see why because, as well as being a general upgrade to their top range digital SLR stills camera the 5D Mark II is Canon’s first digital SLR camera that records HD video.
That’s already too many initials for one paragraph so to be clear… we’re talking about the sort of stills camera your Dad used to have but able to shoot videos with.
I have just had a quick trawl through the ‘reviews’ on youtube but they are all ubergeek (though many are worth watching for the pure camp entertainment of watching middle-aged men get excited by the size of it’s sensor chip. No seriously – check out Gordon Lane he’s as terrifying as he is sincere or better still this review from “Mega What” TV in which the director has made a noble effort at spicing up the material, which is basically a man in a suit talking about a camera on a park bench, by getting the questions asked by a woman and pointlessly lunging the camera at the guy as he speaks. The perspective this gives us is a bit like being a drunk intruding on a particularly painful first date.)
Anyway, like I say all the reviews I found were astonishingly dull so instead I’m giving you this to watch which is odder still. This, and I’ll admit I’ve not watched it to the end, seems to be just shots of a pretty girl being photographed holding the new camera. As if that will somehow make it sexy. As if we’re all going to imagine that, perhaps, the Canon production line is staffed entirely by models and she’s just showing off the one she’s just finished. Better still this pointless posing is all done to a piece of music I happen to know comes free with Apple’s Soundtrack editing software…
This film gets odder every time I watch it.
Anyway, the actual point I’m trying to make is that – d’you see that camera she’s holding? That costs £2k and shoots High Def video… better than that, it shoots High Def video through 35mm Prime Lenses… onto memory cards that you download direct into Final Cut Pro.
SO… you can see why Chris was getting excited by it. We recently had an excuse to use one and a friend of ours has just traded in his old Canon XL2 and bought the 5D Mk II instead. For those of you struggling to keep up through the jargon that’s like swapping a skateboard for a BMW.
There was some worry before we shot about the camera always resetting to factory defaults between takes, but thankfully this problem was solved with a firmware upgrade days before we used it.
There was a slight irritation to the fact that it currently doesn’t happily support an external monitor, or at least not without bypassing the screen on the back of the camera. Judging focus was really only possible through the camera screen so any shot that involved a pull had to be done without a monitor. However all this really meant was that I was pushed into the good habit of not hiding behind a monitor, something it’s all too easy to drop into, making it all to easy to neglect the actors.
Focus pulling was a bit of a pain, but this was probably more because we were massively under crewed and the kit we were borrowing didn’t have a follow focus.
Lastly, though the camera has a pretty decent inbuilt microphone the size of the thing means that we tended to get more camera operator noise than you usually do with a bigger machine. It’s only external sound input is mini-jack so we ended up recording separate sound onto a flash drive.
I think it also has a maximum take length which I’ve heard is 10 minutes but online I can only find quoted at 29 minutes. Either way, this never came close to affecting what we were shooting.
If these few limitations remind you of anything then you’ve probably shot on film – and that was one of the biggest revelations about the whole process. Far from feeling like a step down, like a step away from big bodied grown-up filmmaking, working with the Canon Mark II felt like stepping back up. Prime lenses, the positive need for a focus puller, a director not hiding behind technology, a sound recordist free to roam and a piece of kit that encourages you not to simply turn it on shoot endless wasted hours of nothing… not only were the results beautiful but they were surprisingly rigourous for what was meant to be a freebee shoot for a friend.
I don’t want to sound like an advert but when Canon introduced the XL1 back in 2000 they rocked my world. For the first time it was possible for kids like my brother and me to get hold of a piece of kit that was almost as good as bad tv. I am so jealous of anyone making their first films with the Mark II. So small, so portable and yet not cheap and not lazy… Surely this is going to revolutionise what we do?
Why hasn’t everyone bought one?