It should be public knowledge by now that Syl Arena and I have started a great adventure in shooting a DVD series about Canon Speedlites. It has been a great experience with Syl in front of the camera, creating great content and scenarios for Canon shooters to learn from, and myself behind the camera directing and editing all of this information. We are both very excited to be doing this project together and our goal is to make the definitive source for Canon shooters to find information about using their Speedlites in all sorts of situations, ETTL, manual, and mixed lighting.

Syl will be blogging about what is going on in front of the camera, while I will be documenting what is going on behind the camera. And the biggest news that I can break about this project is the we are using the Canon 5D Mark II exclusively to shoot all of the video for this project. To my knowledge, we are cutting some new trail in using this camera to shoot a project of this scope.

We have just wrapped our first 4 days of shooting and I am currently editing the footage to create a trailer to give you a glimpse of what we are up to as we work on the project. And I am happy to report that the footage looks amazing. I am completely blown away with what this camera is able to produce visually.

I have been shooting video, professionally, for over 4 years for a Fortune 500 company, what I call the day job in these blog posting. I have produced product videos, training videos, covering events and other smaller productions that are needed. I also assist another director of video, which has over 20 years of experience in the industry, much of that working for large market TV stations. We are both in agreement that this camera’s visual qualities are just amazing.

In the next couple of posts I will talk in detail about how well this camera works, and in places in needs improvement. In addition I will also discus what I think you need to shoot good video on this camera, including tripods and additional sound.

But first, a week ago Syl Arena showed up on my door step with so many camera lenses, bodies and Speedlites that I felt like Neo in the first Matrix movie when he asked for “Guns, lots of guns”, except he wasn’t in a trench coat. Syl had a plan and we sat up many late hours over the next four days, planning and scripting out the finer points of the project. We also had many, many long hours in the hot, constant sun of Northern Nevada during the day.

With all of the heat and the long hours, the Mark II never failed. We were concerned about how the sensor would handle the heat while recording video, but it was never an issue.

So how does the Mark II compare to “professional” digital camera system? The short answer is that it compares very well with those other cameras. The major plus of the Mark II is the quality of the sensor in the areas of color, sharpness and the amazing image it produces at very high ISO. Much of the quality of the images comes from the fact that you have access to great Canon glass that you can switch out, which many cameras do not offer unless your pay much for the system. It is also a good time to point out that shoot with this project with higher end, more expensive glass, but more on that later.

I have read many complaints on blogs that the Mark II is not a good camera for shooting video because the controls are so different than most video cameras. I can see this as an honest argument, but since I started out as a still photographer first, that is not as big a deal for me, and even better for the still shooter making the transition to video.

An honest complaint, no matter how you shoot or your past experience, is the poor audio the Mark II produces. The small internal microphone is bad and the lack of audio gain controls is poor for the professional shooter. I am aware that there are very smart people that have hacked the camera so you have audio controls, but I am not looking at hacking the camera as an option. There are also companies that offer external shotgun mics that go on the hot shoe of the camera, which are getting pretty good reviews.

Another solution is to record audio to another device, which is the route we took for this particular project. The Zoom H4n is small but powerful unit that gives you onboard stereo recording and two XLR ports for connecting professional audio solutions like wired mics and wireless mic solutions. We used a Sennheiser wireless mic, so we didn’t have another set of cords to trip on. Since our first day of shooting being thigh deep water, who wants to be plugged into anything. The Zoom H4n allows for audio monitoring, level control and records to a SD disk in WAV or MP3 file formats.

If you have never done much video recording, the next big issue or complaint may sound like nothing, but it really can’t be a serious problem, and that is no time code written to the video files. This makes editing a problem and syncing multiple cameras a real problem. I will spend much longer in the edit bay because I do not have synced time code for each camera on the shoot.

I would have thought the limit of how long the camera can run before it auto stops would have been an issue, but for this type of shoot, our takes are under the 12 minute limit that the camera has until it stops. You can start the camera right back up after this stoppage and you are not limited to how long you can run video through the camera. There were times I wish that I could have locked down a camera for b-roll and have it run for an hour, but I learned to work around it.

When shooting video on the Mark II, you are going to need plenty of CF cards to store all of this footage. Are average day was around 40 gigs of information and we were downloading cards to our laptop at times to have available space on cards to keep shooting. I am happy to report that I used slower speed cards in the cameras and never found it to jam or drop frames.

The big question is would or will I continue to use this system for the rest of the DVD series? The answer is positively yes. For the shortcomings of this camera, it is worth due to the quality of the file, size and removable lenses that can be used. It does cause you to be more on top of your pre-production and will be editing a bit more work. But I think it is worth it. Hell, if Vincent Laforte can shoot a feature film, I can do a DVD.

More in the following days on specifics on this camera and looking at issues like sound, file transfer and post production in the edit bay.

I have posted a quick clip of some b-footage from last weekends shoot. No audio here and there are some sloppy camera moves, but you can get an idea of shooting this camera indoors and outdoors.

Canon 5D Mark II Test Footage from M.D. Welch on Vimeo.

You can view the HD version here.