Notes from the Field

One of the first pieces of advice I give to new photographers is that they should plan on adding a prime camera lens to their camera bag as soon as possible. As I blogged about last year, prime glass is just fantastic and for the most part affordable.

Both Canon and Nikon offer a range of primes, at different price points, to fit into most shooters budgets. One of my favorite Canon prime lenses is the 85mm f/1.8, which is not only tack sharp, but affordable, at an average price of $380.

But like all things in life, there is always something newer, faster and of course, more expensive. This is perfectly personified in the Canon 85mm f/1.2 prime lens, which costs around $1900. Talk about sticker shock.

Since purchasing my 85mm f/1.8 a few years ago, I have always wondered how much better the f/1.2 version could be. Amazing wedding and DSLR video shooters rave about this lens, talking in almost mythical tone about the lens’ sharpness and low light functionality.

With all of these reports, I had to find out for myself. So I took the entire week off of work from the mother ship, during the Thanksgiving holiday, and rented the mighty Canon 85mm f/1.2. (Cue the angelic music).
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Let’s skip the funny and witty introduction paragraph; at least I hope my intros are funny and witty. The Canon 7D is the best camera I have ever bought. There, I said it, now go read another blog about using your iPhone’s camera to document the growth of moss in the forest or something. Sorry I thought I get through it without being witty.

I have owned, and used, many cameras, both Canon and Nikon, digital and film. But this camera seems to have its act together more than any other. Not since the Nikon F100 have a run across a camera that has such great features at a reasonable price point.

When I switched from Nikon to Canon a few years ago, I had some buyer’s remorse. While I love the features of the 1D Mark II, I never really liked the ergonomics of the Canon compared to my past Nikons. My next Canon purchase was the 5D Mark II, a camera which I have fallen in love with and taken many, at least I think so, great frames. But once again, not a big fan of the location of the buttons and the camera never felt right in my hand. I was also discovering the Nikon CLS system with my daytime job’s Nikons and found that my Canons were lacking.

But in the Canon 7D I have found solutions to my wishes for my next Canon body.

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So I received some emails and comments on my post yesterday about using PluralEyes on my Canon 5D Mark II project that I am working on with Syl Arena. I wanted to take a quick moment and update some information on that post and pass on some links to you.

Bruce Sharpe, who is the CEO of Singular Software, the maker of PluralEyes, let me know that some of the issues I had with version 1.0 of the software had been fixed in the version 1.1, currently in beta. The biggest fix is the ability to use PluralEyes on clips with in and out points. I have not had a chance to test this myself, but I did want to pass on this updated information. I will do a test and let you know how it goes in a future post.

Bruce also has a blog called the 25 Hour Day. It is worth a read, since he has many tutorials and video clips on using PluralEyes. Two posts stand out, one on syncing audio from a external recording device and multiclip editing in Final Cut Pro.

Thanks for all the emails and comments.

M.D.

It has been a few weeks since I last talked about shooting video on the Canon 5D Mark II. I have been putting off this post due to the fact I have been working on editing the footage that I shot of Syl Arena for the Speedliters Guide DVD that he and I are working on.

I knew when I was starting on this project that I would have to change the way I worked with video, compared to working with DVCAM and HDV formats that I was used to working on. First was the shift from tape to a solid-state media, which means I no longer have a tape backup of my footage that I have shot. Since I am not capturing off of tape, I need all that footage on the CF cards put on the computer, so I need more hard drive space. But what I found was that the tape issue would not be close to the biggest problem I would run into.

The second and biggest issue that I have run into is the syncing of the audio and separate cameras that we used in shooting this project. At most times, I had two, and sometimes three 5D’s recording at the same time. No matter what type of video format your are recording to, the more cameras you are using, the more problems you may have when you are working post and editing your footage. This is where the 5D shows it’s amateur side of recording video. Every other type of video camera lays down time code, so you can keep track of when events happen and also help with capturing footage. The other plus is you can set the time code to keep running, even when you are not recording. This allows for multiple cameras to be set to the same time code, so you can switch between multiple camera angles with little problems. Since the 5D has no time code, you can sync up cameras as easy as normal video cameras. In fact it very hard to sync up multiple cameras.

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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.

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