Best CF cards for 5D interviews
 

I will be using the 5D for sit down Q&A interviews. I will be able to control when we take a break for the camera or to change media. Was planning on having two cards and swapping them out periodically.

Any thoughts on where the sweet spot is between best performance in this situation vs lowest cost? Obviously I could get a huge gig card with a super fast write speed for big bucks - just trying to "right size" the purchase :)

Thanks in advance

I've been pretty happy with my Kingston 16GB 266x cards. You're limited to ~12 minutes at 1080P, which is a 4GB file. So having some headroom is helpful.

Here it is at B&H: Kingston | 16GB CompactFlash Ultimate 266X Card | CF/16GB-U2

They go on sale pretty often. DO NOT use anything slower than these.

I love the SanDisc 16 gig cards. I have a couple of Extreme III, a couple of Extreme IV and a couple of new UDMA 60MB/s which I got for a great price recently.

Never had any problems except for maybe the odd dropped frame on panning on the IIIs and IVs.

Avey

Thanks Steve & Wayne, that completes today's long list B&H order including a Zoom unit and a 5Dm2 :)

cheers

Nice one Greg, now you're just 'waitin' for that Postman'…

I notice a lot of people are using Zooms. I'm curious to know why the zoom is so popular. I've been using an M-Audio Microtrack II and have been pretty happy. I'm just curious to know if I've been missing out on somethingt. I remember checking out the Zoom last year when I got my 5D Mk II. After some evaluation I chose the Microtrack II over it, but maybe I missed something, because the Zoom seems to be the popular choice.

I have the Microtrack II, and found it to be really noisy. We used it for a festival short, and it was the weak link of the entire production. We ended up spending hours and hours doing critical noise reduction, and needed to add more music and sound design under the dialog than we had planned.

One thing we discovered later was that its gain is digital. I recommend using it at 50% gain at all times. Boosting the gain just adds noise and removes headroom.

It's likely that you have a more sensitive mic than we used for that shoot (an AT815b). With a sensitive mic, very close to the subject, the Microtrack II should be able to deliver somewhat acceptable results. Otherwise, you need to use a clean preamp/mixer up front.

We now have a juicedLink CX231, and with it upstream of the Microtrack II, it is very nearly as clean as the H4n. It has a couple dB more noise than the H4n, and a very faint ticking sound about 90 dB below full scale when the JL and MT2 are used together.

With the JL, we would probably get as good a result from a cheaper recorder that doesn't need phantom power or a balanced input (the JL CX231 has an unbalanced mic output.) And the cheaper recorder would likely accept regular batteries. The MT2 has a fixed battery design.

At least we got it for a really low price through craigslist. :)