Studio
The 5D Mark II Continued: Production and Post Challenges
7/6/2009 at 11:55 AM by Suraj Das
For the past two weeks, my DP, John Francis McCarthy, and I have been using two Canon 5D Mark II's to shoot a short documentary on an entertainment/lifestyle blogger working in New York City. I figured since I had been gushing over the camera a few weeks ago, before I bought it, I should post a follow-up now that I own it and use it.
We opted to use the 5D Mark II for a number of reasons. Our subject spends a lot of time in exclusive, swanky New York City nightlife venues that are accustomed to seeing photography equipment, but would balk at the size of even the smallest professional videography rigs. A shoulder mounted Panasonic HVX would raise eyebrows and eventually get us kicked out; so the 5D Mark II's small unimposing size was a big plus. Additionally, our subject was used to visiting up to five or six different venues a night, and having such a portable system helped us keep up and not lose a beat.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all of the nightlife venues we visited were very dimly lit - and the Mark II's high ISO sensitivity made it one of the only cameras that could even capture footage in such locations without a tremendous amount of additional lighting (which, again, would have been out of the question with the managers of these venues). In extreme cases, when available light was still not enough for a good exposure, we used a small camera-mounted LED light, the LitePanels Micro, which worked beautifully and produced well-lit images.
In order to record clean sound, we used two separate microphones - the Sennheiser EW 100 G2 was used to wirelessly mic our subject, and a Sennheiser MKE 400 shotgun mic was used on the second camera in an effort to get a good reference track to sync to later on. While the wireless microphone worked extraordinarily well in even the loudest bars and nightclubs, the MKE 400 delivered mixed results. In quiet settings, the MKE 400 provided us with nearly-professional quality audio recordings. In louder settings, the microphone did not do as great a job of isolating the desired source as we had wanted, and made syncing to the wireless audio very difficult in post.
The Mark II does not allow you to monitor audio levels and does not provide you with a headphone jack to hear what the camera is recording - both major setbacks when shooting in a live setting with a spontaneous and unpredictable subject. We were often forced to shoot without having a clear sense of what our audio would sound like once we reviewed the footage. The best way around this seems to be to just test as much as possible before shooting - try out different mic setups, review footage on the camera, and see what works best. Still, the speaker on the camera is pretty weak and doesn't give a great sense of what the final audio will sound like. This Magic Lantern firmware upgrade allows you to monitor audio levels, but installation of third-party firmware voids the Canon warranty, and so we did not test it.
The MKE 400 has a small power switch that is mostly useless - the mic doesn't use battery power when it is not in operation - but because of the chaos of documentary style shooting, there were some instances in which we forgot that the mic was switched off, footage was captured with no audio monitoring or headphones, and we found later that the footage was missing audio altogether. In the future, to avoid elaborate solutions to the 5D's audio issues, I will record sound separately to a digital recorder and sync everything in post using the 5D's on camera audio as a guide track.
Editing - which is the stage we are currently in - is not without its challenges either. The 5D Mark II captures footage in the compressed H.264 format, which is a nightmare to edit in Final Cut Pro. I attempted to edit the unprocessed footage on a Final Cut Pro 6.05 timeline on a 3.06 Ghz Apple iMac, with 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card with 512 MB RAM, and there were still drop frames on every cut, and Final Cut even crashed a couple of times, causing me to lose unsaved work.
I found the best way to edit the footage is to convert it to Apple ProRes 422 (FYI - the best way to do this is using Compressor, and you want to end up with these settings - Apple ProRes 422 1080p, 29.97 fps) and then re-compress the footage to H.264 upon completion - but the setback here is that, on average, conversion from H.264 to ProRes 422 took my brand new iMac about 6 minutes for every 1 minute of footage. So for our shoot, where we had captured about twelve hours of footage, just getting the footage to a point where we could comfortably log subclips and build short sequences required an enormous amount of conversion and rendering time.
Work on the documentary continues, and I'm sure more ugly issues will rear their heads as we approach completion. Once we get there, I'll post some clips - comparing footage lit with the LED light to footage not lit with the light, footage recorded with the wireless mic to footage recorded with the shotgun, etc. Until then, hopefully some of this information will help you make better decisions as you go out and shoot with this awesome, exciting new camera - which is not without its challenges and drawbacks.
Suraj Das Writer, Director
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