I agree, just for being able to lock down the shutter. Although, who knows how manual will actually work with a non-Canon lens attached? It wouldn't be beyond reason to think it might just work the same way as it does today. In a way, that would make sense, no reason to make using non-Canon glass any easier now would it?

Also, it's going to be interesting to see some other aspects of how this was actually implemented. For example, will they stick to the limited range of shutter speeds and apertures that auto mode had? So, you get manual control over limited settings? Or will all speeds and f-stops be available (b/w the supported ranges)? Also, will you be able to change settings WHILE recording? For the indie types that probably won't be a problem because you wouldn't change your setup mid-take, but I can think of some instances where it might be nice to have that option. Also, will exposure compensation work in manual? While recording or not recording? Not sure you'd need it of course, but it'll be interesting to see if you can and how it operates (changes ISO maybe?).

Anyway, not nitpicking at all, I love the fact they listened and reacted, I'm just real curious to see how this was implemented...

Canon, thank you for listening to your user base. My L lenses were very happy to hear this news. Now they're telling me they want 24P. Please...

But equally they didn't say 'Full' Manual control, will it be full, where every ISO/Shutter/F number is available to us, or something less?

I think if they had more features built into this update, they would certainly blow their horn about it.

They announced enough to get our attention. There's a possibility that they will add even more features and have additional horns to toot. That would get them two big news week cycles.

My hopes are high, but my expectations (beyond solid manual control) are not.

If they had waited one more day, I would have purchased a Nikon 80-200 manual lens used. Now, I might put that money towards a Canon 80-200 IS USM which may mean another $1600 to Canon instead of more used Nikon glass. I don't mind manual lenses at all but the IS in a telephoto would be quite helpful.

Considering the update isn't ready yet, I'm starting to think a lack of manual control was just a huge oversight on their part. Without manual control on video, that also means no manual control shooting in live view mode. That all seems like they weren't completely ready for live view mode when it was released. I'm glad I got this camera, especially now that there are firmware updates coming from two directions.

Help: I'm a little confused by the sensor size
 

The above describes the sensor as 24mm x 36mm which provides depth of feild characteristics unseen in ANY video camera.

Am I to understand that this 5DMarkII will provide depth of field the same or similar to full 35mm film during video mode? Or is this only providing DoF similar to 16mm film during video operation?

Thanks

Not to derail the thread, but I purchased an FD adapter as well (probably the same one) and was unimpressed by the results. Besides the softer image, the amount of light loss was very significant. 2 stops roughly. I have detailed notes & numbers, but never posted them since everyone was buying Nikons anyway.

Same DOF as 35mm stills film, yes. Hence the collective love affair with the camera. :)

Same here. For cinematic work I don't need AF, so the Nikon primes are a bargain. I think I bought 8 or so, none over $150.

Thanks for the help Dylan. I have some manual focus Nikon lenses for 35mm film cameras that I am using with a Brevis adapter.....can I use them on this 5D MarkII camera??

With the help of a Nikon - EF adapter, yes. Do a quick search in this section and you'll come up with detailed threads on what is available. Many of us are using cheap $8 adapters off Ebay and are quite happy.

Wow...It seems this could out do the Red Scarlet.

Having done a bit more testing I would agree that the image is a bit softer Perhaps I didn't do such detailed testing as I honestly didn't notice 2 stops difference in exposure & I did stop down to F22 but it was a very bright & sunny day. The one FD lens I do have (35-105mm F3.5) has a reputation for being particularly sharp so maybe this offsets the softening of the adaptor to some extent.

The problem with FD->EF adapters (for those reading apart from Dylan) is this. When Canon moved from FD to EF they changed the focal point of the lenses & without adding a lens in the adaptor they cannot focus to infinity when mounted on an EOS. Given the price of the adaptors you can bet that the adaptor lens doesn't match the quality of the Canon lens so in general these adaptors have a poor reputation. There is also a increase in focal length of approx 1.25X.

Lenses of most every other type of mount can be fitted to the 5DII using a simple adaptor with no glass in it & thus no possibility of diminishing the optical quality. Given the potential for problems & disappointment with FD lenses on the 5DII & the fact there are so many other lenses that will work without problems I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy an FD lens & adapter.

Yes and no. Comparing the 5D2 to the Scarlet 2/3" (the Scarlet S35 and FF35 are in a very different price range), here's a quick summary...

5D MkII
* Fantastic low light capabilities
* Full frame DOF - more than Super 35 film
* Support for many, many lenses; you can rent glass in any large city.
* Affordable and widely available

Scarlet 2/3" (expected, anyway)
* Blazing fast capture for slow motion (180 fps burst, I believe)
* 24/25p
* Superior audio support
* No rolling shutter artifact to speak of
* Better ergonomics for video
* Electronic zoom
* Continuous autofocus
* RAW video for smooth grading
* True 1080/2k resolution without aliasing (the 5D has moire artifacts)
* Longer shooting times

If you don't need the 35mm DOF, Scarlet has the potential to be superior in many ways. However, if you want 35mm and you want it now, the 5D MkII is king.

Jon:

Have you shot with the RED One? I have. Scarlet will have some rolling shutter artifacts because it will have a CMOS imager with a rolling shutter. It is just a matter of how apparent the rolling shutter artifacts will be.

Dan

New firmware... what exactly does it all mean?
 

The new firmware - something I've been quietly waiting for -is here. But, despite my reading of all the threads, I'm a bit confused -what does it all mean?

My understanding is that this new firmware essentially makes the video grabbing aspect easier - no more changing f stops and shutter rates - but alters nothing else.

If I bought a new, up-graded Mark II, what exactly can I do as a film maker? How close can I get to 24p? Does the firmware change the compression rates or ability to transfer the video data to editing systems? Does it (can it) address rolling shutter?

I understand the pros/cons of shooting a feature w/ a DSLR (ie - no eyepiece, strange form factor), but I'm not sure exactly how the new firmware would impact trying to shoot a feature.

Any ideas/thoughts would be greatly appreciated...

john

The thing is, we don't know. All the press release says is that we can control the aperture, ISO and shutter speed, within the stated limits. It doesn't say if we can change any/all of those settings during filming, or if they can only be set prior to pressing the record button. The press release says nothing about 24fps, so I would assume, at this point, that the camera will be stuck at 30fps, as it is now. The same for compression rates... no change has been stated.

Julian

I expect that the 2/3" Scarlet rolling shutter will be much less than the Red One, simply because of that 180 fps burst speed.

Clearly, to achieve that frame rate, Scarlet 2/3" must be capable of scanning from top to bottom in no more than 1/180th of a second (5.55ms.) By contrast, the 5D MkII scans in 25 ms (based on research by Mark Hahn, and confirmed by me.)

Anyway, in theory, Scarlet's rolling shutter should be about five times faster than the 5D2's - and better than the Red One's as well.

Of course, this is all theory. We will see when Scarlet actually hits the streets.

That's the working assumption. Rather than the camera setting its own aperture, shutter and ISO - and forgetting all the settings between shots - we should be able to set each of these variables and have them stay fixed from shot to shot.

In the end it will speed up production (no more messing with the camera to get the settings we want), it will reduce the chance of error due to simplicity, and it will help us ensure good matching from shot to shot.

It might also help us get a specific look - especially with Canon lenses - that wasn't available before. The automatic software would often jump between levels, and effectively made some settings impossible to achieve.

So... in theory, we will be able to 1) dial in exactly what we want, and 2) not have to adjust anything from one take to the next.

We will know more next week...

Your logic seems pretty sound, I am impressed. Of course, anything and everything we are discussing is really nothing but conjecture since RED is constantly changing and tinkering with the specs.

Dan

I agree, hence, I believe the Scarlet will look a bit different now after the 5D manual control dust has settled. (I also agree that Jon's logic, as always, is impeccable ;^)

-- peer

I'm sure you're right - but how then can the manual 5DII have shutter speeds up to 1/4000 sec?

Shutter speed and read out speed aren't connected. The degree of rolling shutter is a result of how long it takes to read the lines from the top to the bottom (read-reset speed), shutter speed only affects how long each line is exposed for. So each line can be exposed for 1/30th-1/4000 of a second before it is read, but it will always take 25ms to read out all of the lines on the sensor before resetting to the top.

Well said, Evan,

Some people are also confused as to how the camera can shoot close to a 1/30 exposure with a 30 fps frame rate and also have rolling shutter.

The answer is that the lines can expose independently as short or as long as they'd like - and they can expose simultaneously. The problem is that they are read out sequentially, and each read takes some amount of time, so the exposures are all offset in time.

In fact the first line can start exposing for the next frame while the last line is still exposing for the current frame, and has yet to be read. It's a bit of a brain bender, that!

Evan, Jon, thanks for the explanation.

Even the Scarlet 2/3 is a different price range unless you plan on shooting video with just the brain part (2,500$) itself

at 1080p the fastest it goes is 30fps

The rolling shutter might be better at the smaller resolution that can hit 150fps but at 1080p and 30 fps it remains to me be seen. Ergonomics and audio support come from buying the components

The Scarlet and 5D prices aren't the same, but close enough to compete for similar budgets. I would think that the fixed lens Scarlet is cheaper than the 5D2 plus a moderate lens collection.

Regarding 1080p, the frame rate limitation is probably due to the encoder, or to the limits of HD-SDI or HDMI. It shouldn't affect sensor speed. I'd be really surprised if the rolling shutter varies when choosing RAW or 1080p, unless there's cropping going on.

In fact, here's a tip for getting less rolling shutter on Vimeo with the 5D2. Instead of scaling to 720p, crop. That reduces the top-to-bottom time from 25ms to 16.7ms.

Here's some perspective about the 5D2 sensor vs. the D90. The D90 clearly has worse rolling shutter than the 5D2. Let's assume that it is scanning 90% of the time vs. the 5D2, which scans 75% of the time. (And, yes, this is an assumption.) However, the frame rate is 24p on the D90, rather than 30p on the 5D2. My assumption yields 37.5 ms of scan time top-to-bottom for the D90. Keep in mind that it only has 720 lines vs the 5D2's 1080 lines.

Using my assumption, the D90 scans at 52us per line. The 5D2 scans at about 23us per line. Add it up and the 5D2 sensor is about twice as fast as the D90 sensor - and that's on a full frame vs. APSC chip.

If we assume the Scarlet scan time I posted above, and recall that it has about 50% more lines to scan, it's about 7 times faster than the 5D2 sensor, in terms of line speed. Sure, it's a 2/3" chip vs. full frame, but still, it's pretty impressive!

sweet
 

I'm glad that they decided to fix the problem. They could have very easily just went on to the next model of amazing DSLR's. Thank you Canon!

Hi, everybody!

I am on the verge of buying a new video camera. Last weeks I had numerous headaches looking for the perfect camera 4,000 USD could buy. They are almost all HDV(a home consumer codec and almost dying at only 25Mb/s) and small sensor(1/3"). Till a few days ago I was "hardly determined" to buy the Canon XH A1s, as all my funds are around 4,000USD. After long debate with myself and mostly after seeing the new update I "definitely decided" to go with Canon EOS 5D Mark II, despite the strange ergonomics for shooting video. I intend to shoot mostly drama and I am not very interested in kind of documentary or news shooting style(on the go). I know almost to nothing on AVCHD. So, I have a couple of questions and I am waiting answers from people who have some kind of pro shooting experience with Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Here are my questions:

1. How suited is 5D Mark II for video pro shooting? What kind of problems could appear all along the work flow, starting with shooting and ending with editing.(Have you tried chroma keying? Are there motion artifacts? etc)

2. I read in a manual that video record starts by pressing the "set" button. Is it possible to start recording from a remote control?

I apologize for the long intro and thank you for your answers.

God help us all!
Honestly,
Christian I. Ionescu

Actually, it does 150fps at a higher resolution, not smaller - and that actually suggests to me that the rolling shutter won't change between the two resolutions.

The specs say 120fps at 3k, and 30 at 1080p. If they were just cropping the 3k resolution to get 1080 then there's no reason they couldn't do the same frame rate, and they specify full frame for the 1080 at 30. So the lower frame rate limitation of 1080 comes from the overhead of downsampling (and possibly debayering/compression, if it's going to an RGB codec instead of RAW) and is not a limitation of the sensor. So I think it's pretty safe to assume that the rolling shutter should be the same regardless of the resolution/frame rate.

The 150fps burst at 3k capability to me indicates the likely sensor read-out speed - I'm sure what makes it a 'burst' spec is the storage bottleneck. So the ability to read the entire sensor at 150fps indicates a < 7ms read-reset speed which is about a quarter of the 5D's. Personally I've found the rolling shutter on the 5D to be only a minor inconvenience in everyday use, so I'm pretty confident it won't be an issue at all with Scarlet.

I think a lot of people either discount or simply aren't aware of Scarlet's greatest strength in comparison to almost any other camera - RAW recording. I haven't personally worked with RED RAW footage yet, but I recently did some work with raw data from a 3DVX3 - a DVX100-based 3D frankencam that pulls 10-bit 720p+ RAW data directly from the sensors. The quality of the footage was amazing and a real revelation to work with - side by side with the same subject the footage was as good as (in some cases better than) footage from an HPX500. Amazing, considering it came from standard definition 1/3" chips in a 5-year old, < $4k fixed-lens camera. It made me realize how much of a limitation in-camera processing and compression really is - and how good Scarlet should be considering it's a much more modern, larger, higher resolution sensor. If RED can hit the current specs and ship Scarlet in a reasonable time frame I don't think any current camera will really compare to even the fixed-lens version just because of the RAW capabilities.

It's important to realize that HDV is *not* a "home consumer codec." HDV is the recording format of a variety of professional-level camera systems including JVC Pro HD as well as Sony and Canon. HDV is consistently used for broadcast applications. It is most definitely not "dying." And the Canon HV series CMOS sensor is actually larger than 1/3rd-inch.

Yes, by using one of a couple of Canon EOS wireless remote controller models, such as the Canon RC-1. Hope this helps,

Chris, the remote is able to execute the SET button? is the remote IR? Then wouldn't you need to be pointing at the IR port on the camera?

Discussed here http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/canon-eos...s-release.html

I don't know, but by "drama" if you mean theater plays, then keep in mind that you can only shoot 12 minutes continuously with the 5D.

-- peer

Good point Peer. I have been shooting long interviews and realistically, besides the 4GB limit, to shoot long form, you need to buy two 5D MKIIs and alternate between them because the imager heats up and gets noisy too. I am sure I will be picking up another one or two of them unless something better and cheaper comes out.

Dan

Have you seen this with your own eyes? I shoot with the 5D2 in live mode for 8 to 10 hours a day, all day, and I don't see any extra noise.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to afford the GH1 for myself let alone buy it for someone else buy if I was extremely rich I would loan one to Tramm Hudson and tell him he can keep it as long as he develops a firmware to enable live output during record mode. If that were to happen, I bet Panasonic would be just as quick to announce a firmware as Canon was.

People were already producing some wonderful stuff. With this firmware, it’s looks like we ain’t seen nothing yet.

But who cares? As long as it isn't a full frame camera, I'm certainly not looking in Panasonic's direction.

-- peer

That’s almost like saying who cares about the HM100 or the HMC150 when you can get an EX1 with bigger chips.

For the people who either can't afford the 5D Mark II, want an articulating screen, constant auto focusing in video or want a more portable camera, they care.

Yep, people are different. In my case, I was debating getting a ground-glass DOF converter for my already bulky Canon XL2 rig, or get a full frame 5D. What I've always been after is that classy film look.

-- peer