A Few Cool Things

[Jim Giberti]

24 hours into the 5D2 and here's how it goes for me:

For reference I used my personal studio at home ( I own a creative/production company) with a 24" dual core iMac w/ 4 gigs of RAM. I'm a music producer too, and the room is acoustically tuned with good reference monitors (Tascams and NS10's).

So, my FCP HD window set on my main monitor has a Viewer and Canvas at 50% and I can play and edit H.264 footage perfectly. The workflow is as cool as I was hoping it would be in anticipation...I hate logging and anything that takes away from the creative process; and IMO that''s where the 5D shines. Plus the footage looks beautiful - so far it shows more +s than -s form my approach.

Also, and this is a really nice workflow thing if you're running Leopard on a reasonably fast Mac - Quicklook is the ideal "logging window". It plays 1080p perfectly full screen and I can click through any clips in real time and they play instantly. So drop your CF folder card on the desktop, review the clips full screen, drop what you want into a keeper folder, open a FCP project and import the folder ready to edit in real time.

Honestly, after reading threads for a while, this is way smoother than I anticipated and frankly, than it ought to be for this stage in the evolution. As far as sending the edit out to Color after edit, that's pretty much a creative and technical necessity with any serious work.

Again for reference, my current systems include Canon and JVC cameras and Mini 35 and Letus adapters.

Another place where I think Canon really deserves credit is the audio, as absolutely minimalist as it is. This is nothing formal, but a quick listen to shots from a few different settings, and the tiny little mic and the auto gain system they developed for this is actually surprisingly useable.

I found the signal to noise to be respectable and the audio quality for voice and ambience to be decent (and sorry, once again, just for reference I use Neumann mics and Focusrite preamps in the studio and on location). I would use this in a pinch but more importantly, with a KMR or ME66 it will sound nice....certainly nice enough if you don't have/want a a sound. Sometimes simpler is better.

That's where they deserve credit (sorry for calling one of the guys silly the other day <g>.) In choosing to go the all auto route - which I definitely get as the tool for the "one man show"/photojournalist - they came up with a pretty smooth compressor/limiter chip that doesn't seem to clip or pump and "preamp" noise is even ok.

I did have a hot pixel that seems to have gone with sensor cleaning and a disturbing tendency for the camera to freeze (5 times) where I actually had to pop out the battery each time to get it to power off...losing whatever was recorded in that clip!. I was using a brand new Sandisk 30x 8 gig. I formatted it and so far, no problems since...so hopefully.

over and out.

[Jon Fairhurst]

Good point about the audio quality. It's better than one would expect. On "The Last Outpost" (available on my site), we used the "scream" from the camera without any processing whatsoever. There was simply no need for ADR, noise reduction, or even EQ. That was a pleasant surprise.

Still, we'll be using a shotgun into a Microtrack II for future shoots, but it's nice to know that the mic works okay in a pinch.

BTW, this is one more reason not to autofocus or even use OIS. The motor noise will harm your audio far more that the preamps or the limiter!