Canon EOS 5D MKIII - the Swiss Army knife of video cameras

When the Canon 5D MKIII was launched in March 2012 after years of anticipation the reaction of the market was one of slight disappointment or even indignation. The long delay of the launch (caused in part by the tsunami in Japan) had left everybody expecting a camera that would turn the video shooting world on its head and it seemed that this was just an improvement of the MKII.

Or so it seemed.

I used to work for Bernie Ecclestone on Formula One and I had all these ideas for on-screen information we could provide the viewer and asked why we didn't do them for the new season. Mr E's right hand man Eddie Baker replied "Don't add too many new elements in one go, if you do some of the best stuff will go unnoticed." Gradually in the seasons that followed the on-screen graphics were added to, much to the joy of F1 fans.

In a way the Canon 5D MKIII is the same and has lots of features hidden away that are now being revealed both by Canon and others and I see the camera now has three levels of operation. 

Level 1. This is the camera as it comes out of the box (with original firmware). Shooting to the internal cards using H.264 with All-I compression at 90 MB/s or IPB at 31 MB/s the quality was a distinct improvement on the MKII (especially with the improved low light performance). It is used as a B-roll camera in the main and CF cards don't have to be massive or ridiculously fast. It was a camera used to supplement other cameras.

Level 2. Other cameras such as the Panasonic GH3 started to have the ability to output the video signal through the HDMI monitoring port directly to an external recorder like the Atmos Ninja or the Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle. 

Atmos Ninja 2

Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle

This could also be done with the MKIII but it was not possible to get a clean output - no information over the pictures including the red recording dot. In October 2012 the Magic Lantern team released Alpha 2 which allowed clean out pictures on the HDMI among a host of other improvements. Six months later Canon released a firmware update that allowed the camera to do the same thing - officially. This gave the MKIII the ability to record in 4:2:2 colour space which I won't explain here but gives more flexibility for colour correction. It also meant it is possible to record in less compressed formats such as ProRes 422. With a proper external sound recorder this brought the MKIII up to A-camera status and it became a more practical unit to use for interviews and documentaries.

Level 3. This was the Level people had dreamed of and hoped for when the MKIII was launched. Because the camera is a DSLR is can shoot still pictures in RAW format which gives simply the best recording format available and the dream was to capture this stream of still images and combine them to a video clip in the way that time lapsers have done for years. But it seemed a pipe-dream until Magic Lantern discovered a way of making the camera do it, and do it to internal recording media. They have just announced the possibility to record 14-bit which gives even more colour information to play with. This level goes beyond that of an A-roll camera and becomes a film camera and the results are quite stunning as James Miller's Genesis film displays.

Level 4 would turn it into a EOS 1DX C+ and record 4K RAW to an external record device. This is my dream and a month ago I wouldn't even have mentioned it in public, but now I don't think it is all that fantastical, I'm sure Magic Lantern think the same. Canon have probably got their fingers crossed that no-one ever achieves it.

So the Canon 5D MKIII really is the most flexible camera around and can be used for everything with the possible exceptions of sports and car chases and the analogy with the Swiss Army knife would be complete if there was a flip out bottle opener in the card bay - Canon please work on that. Design supplied.

4K at BVE in London and future proofing

It's been a week since BVE was held at it's new location at Excel in East London and I really enjoyed my two days there, partly for the old colleagues I kept bumping in to, partly because of the new kit I could actually see and touch and partly because of the 4K Cinema presentations. The 3D & 4K Cinema seminars were held in a room about 5 minutes away from the main exhibition so I felt like an orienteerer (or whatever someone who participates in orienteering is called) getting my badge scanned each time I moved between the two locations.

Philip Bloom's excellent presentation "The DSLR journey: from the 5D mkII to the 4K 1DC" was so popular that over 150 people were turned away each day, including me on Tuesday. Philip has not been too positive in the past about 4K's future but one of the reasons I follow him on twitter (@PhilipBloom) is because he is prepared to have his mind changed. He had shot a pop video with Olly Knights on the Canon EOS-1D C the previous week, quickly edited it in Adobe Premiere and Dissolve and produced a 4K ProRes 422 file which the venue guys converted to a DCP to show on the 4K projector at BVE.

The first time he had seen the video in 4K was at rehearsals the previous day, because he, like 99.9% of us working in 4K, doesn't have a 4K monitor (Sony had one on their stand). The only way he could check his pictures at 4K resolution was blowing them up into quarters on his retina screen. I have to say the pictures looked very good and Philip didn't have a massive rig like Canon used on "The Ticket", he just added a TV Logic field monitor:

Canon EOS-1D C on the Ticket (from Canon website)

Philip Bloom (with bag) shooting the Olly Knight video with EOS-1D C
(from Philip Bloom's blog)

The video had been shot very quickly and on the hoof, in Philip's words - guerilla filming - which is pretty incredible at 4K, and he managed to turn it around in about 5 days, which makes a nonsense of anyone claiming that shooting 4K at the moment is impractical.

Of course when you are on an island in the Pacific you might need a bit of backup and Sky's Galapagos series was certainly ambitious. 3D on a volcano - tick, and 4K? Why not. The first episode was shown in 4K 3D (or is it 3D 4K) at BVE and we were suitably furnished with dark glasses, which was a little disappointing. But the effect was not. Once you have seen a marine iguana snort out salt in 3D4K there is little that can impress you. I was in row 6 but wanted to be in row minus 3 to really see the crispness of the image but it was still pretty good from 12 metres away.

In an interview with tech radar this week John Cassy, the head of 3D at Sky TV reaffirmed the company's commitment to 3D and claimed that 4K would not be the innovation that replaces 3D but the technology that enhances the format, "There are very clear benefits that 4K gives 3D. The resolution is better and also it could help in glasses-free 3D because it enables that whole resolution and picture quality." He also claims to have seen a glasses free version of 3D but like a News of the World journalist failed to reveal the source.

Canon's 4K camera the C500 is dropping in price but is still at almost £19,000 so it is a hire only beast for now,but the EOS-1D C £10k less than that but still some way off my Christmas list. To me the cameras that will change the broadcast world though are the Sony PMW-F5 and F55 with the AXS-F5 4K recorder (about £16k and £24k respectively) which get round the rolling shutter problem and are "proper cameras" provided you have perfectly flat shoulders. 

There was a lot of talk about how much storage all this 4K material is going to take up but now I wouldn't consider buying less than 3 terabyte external drives (4 TB are out there), 6 times larger than I was buying 2 years ago. With the amount of storage looking like it will shortly double on a hard drive platter I am looking forward to shooting RAW 4K at a price point close to shooting HD now in about 2 years. 

To conclude I will quote John Cassy of Sky again who sums up my opinion on 4K, "We have a watching brief on Ultra HD and 4K. Actually what we have been doing, the Attenborough shows have all been filmed in 4K - and in some cases 5K - so they have been captured and future-proofed in a sense, as far as we can." 

Future proofing avoids obsolescence, if you get it right.

Useful software for videographers and photographers - Part 2

Earlier this year I was presented with some footage shot in Cote d'Ivoire, Africa on a Canon 5D MKII. The pictures were OK but the sound was distorted when the levels peaked and a look at the waveform showed that everything was square off. After an appeal on Twitter (@pukkascott if you want to follow) one suggestion was to try iZotope's RX2 audio repair software. 

iZotope RX2 tools

This is an immensely powerful suite of tools including Denoise, Declip, Spectral Repair, Declick & Decrackle, Remove Hum and more. After a quick view of an instructional video I applied Declip to the exported WAV file and after a little bit of playing around the distortion was completely removed and the waveform peaks nicely rounded. At $349 for the standard version it is not cheap but could save your bacon. 
A much cheaper version called music and speech cleaner is available for $39 which improves noisy speech but is no good for declipping.
There a lots of sound capturing pieces of software available and after a lot of experimenting I plumped for SoundTap by NCH software. It produces very clean records from anything played on a computer or voice recordings from Skype. 
There a lots of sound capturing pieces of software available and after a lot of experimenting I plumped for SoundTap by NCH software. It produces very clean records from anything played on a computer or voice recordings from Skype. 

SoundTap

Backup is one of the most important day to day operations since tapeless production came along. It took me a while to get round the fact that my G-Tech Raid drives were not backed up despite having two drives in the case but my Netgear network drives were. So now I use Netgear network drives to backup the G-Tech ones using Netgear's own NTI Shadow software. It works OK but it's a resource hogger and I have to disable the software when editing.
Backup is one of the most important day to day operations since tapeless production came along. It took me a while to get round the fact that my G-Tech Raid drives were not backed up despite having two drives in the case but my Netgear network drives were. So now I use Netgear network drives to backup the G-Tech ones using Netgear's own NTI Shadow software. It works OK but it's a resource hogger and I have to disable the software when editing.

Deep Meta thumbnail selection

It's important to set up the right recording location and the file naming convention in options as it would be impossible to find the recordings later if you don't. One feature I really like about the software is that even when you click "start recording" the file only starts to be created when it senses an audio input. Until the end of December it is available for $19.99 so I recommend you to get it this week.

To backup my system drive I use Casper 7.0 by Future Systems which creates a clone of the drive. The software manages to copy every file on the drive so the backup is true replica of the primary drive and when that falls over you really can slot in the backup and everything boots up perfectly. 

It is light on computer resources and it uses SmartClone to only back up changes to the drive, but doesn't take hours checking the drive like other tools I have tried. I doesn't work with network drives or on a Mac unfortunately but should be on everybody's PC.

Getting more specialist I thought I would briefly mention two tools I use to upload and manage stock material. 

I recently discovered Deep Meta by Belgium company Eazign byba which is a great analysis tool for iStockphoto material. I won't go into detail about what the software can do because as it is free there is no reason not to try it, but one feature I discovered is a real bonus. If you control+click to select a number of connected files and then right click to open the dialogue window, click on "create thumbnail links...", save changes and a little while later the associated thumbnails will appear in the iStockphoto listing for each one giving a link to alternative shots for a purchaser. 

 Finally Send to Smugmug by Omar Shahine is a very useful piece of freeware for uploading photo and video files to your Smugmug account. Once account details have been entered it will list your albums (or you can create a new one) that you can upload to. Choose a folder containing the files and select which files you want to send and click upload. Very quick and easy.

What goes down must go up (in price)

A lot of people seems to be getting quite excited and Tweeting with nervous energy - the Canon C300 DSLR-in-a-video-body is about to be delivered to those who are happy to stump up around £10,0000 or $15,000 for a camera body. Of course for that money it won't work. You need to spend another few thousand on handy things like lens adaptors, storage media, cheese boards (don't ask) and so on.

Apparantly this camera will produce footage that looks as good or slightly better than the Canon 5D MKII but with proper video stuff like mic inputs and decent metering. But is the C300 five times as good as the 5D MKII that has been used to shoot prime-time drama (House MD) and now an Oscar nominated documentary (Hell and Back Again)? Well we won't know until the side by side reviews are complete and Philip Bloom gives his highly important verdict.

But if you can't wait, umm...wait. Don't buy a C300 yet because even more exciting is the overdue announcement of the Canon 5D MKIII (yes Mark 3). Canon may have delayed the launch of this so it doesn't effect the initial sales of the C300, because even if the new 5D only improves a bit it is going to be a very worthy video camera (that happens to also take superb stills by the way). And everyone will already own all the peripherals needed to shoot great video with a stills camera.So how do Canon pitch the new 5D MKIII?  Well I would double the price of the body up from around £1,600 for the current model to £3,200. It would still be almost £7,000 cheaper than a C300 (and cheaper than Canon's top of the range still cameras) and be within the reach of semi-pro operators, but it would make it look like a premium upgrade. Buyers wouldn't have to spend any extra on batteries, lenses or cheese boards.

Would I buy one at that price to shoot video? Probably not. I would get a Panasonic GH2 with a Driftwood hack for less than £1000 because it gives fantastic results and at that price I can employ a sound-man, an assistant and someone to make the tea.