5DMII Shoot tomorrow need advice!
 

I have a shoot this weekend with a rented 5D Mark II along with every prime lens made by Canon up to 300mm F2.8. I've read every available piece of information I could get my hands on and viewed most of the tutorials on Vimeo.

Some questions I'm still unclear about. How much video will fit on a 1GB card? I have 15 of them, should I buy a bigger CF card or will I get by with 15x 1Gb + a Notebook? Any other advice would be appreciated, our shoot is located in the middle of nowhere, once we hit the road I'll have no connection to read up. I'll be trying some shots with my Glidecam too.

Your cards will dictate part of your workflow.

Do you want to continue switching cards throughout the whole process and transferring to your laptop every 5-8 minutes?

If possible grab a few extra batteries if you can find them.

I would recommend you try out the shooting asap to get use the camera. It's much different than operating a normal video one.

Even though it sounds like you have alot of cards (15) you really only have 15 Gig of
storage....

I guess you can offload to the laptop... might bring an external hard drive for more storage.

I normally have 32 GB cards available and 500 GB external for offload... you can also use
CD/DVD if your laptop has the capability to write to them...

You can get about 3 minutes per GB. That seems really tight. We used 4GB cards, which are much more comfortable.

My big concern would be if the cards aren't fast enough. Ours are SanDisk Extreme IV cards, and they've worked without a single problem.

On the other hand, we used an older, smaller card in our MicroTrack II audio recorder, and it died. But we didn't know it until we had lost most of the evening's narrations.

Also, don't forget to implement some sort of a data management and backup strategy. Each day, we copied everything to a harddrive, and used WinRAR to compress the data and store it to fully stuffed and verified DVDs. The compression wasn't important to us, but filling the DVDs and having the extra checksums to verify were good.

Best of luck with your shoot!

Nicholas, the fact is that you have a 4GB limit of HD video footage. So if time isn't a problem, you're fine. But I say at least go out and grab an 8GB CF.

JS

Thanks for replies, John think I'll go with your recommendation.

For those interested I uploaded an uncut version of my weekend getaway with the 5DMII at
First 5DMII Experience (Uncut) on Vimeo

Very nice footage! It looks like everyone had fun too.

What stabilization did you use for your "circle the couple" shot? It looks great!

I hain't no pro
 

But I thought you did a great job.

That was extremely "fresh". Panning the light was awesome!

I know it may be extremely unorthodox, but I'd leave the equipment showing, like the fan, in the final production. I'd love to keep the whole thing, just as it looks now, to watch later with my wife and friends.

I'd watch a video pointing at a ceremony about one time. I'd show this to my friends for years.