Filming in RAW with the Canon 5D MKIII

James Miller is a film maker and a brave man. Only a brave man would get hold of a brand new $3000 camera and pull it apart without a manual or a safety net just to see if he can make it slightly better. But then this is a man who likes to take the lens off a camera while it is recording. He calls it lens whacking, I call it art and almost everyone else describes it as a certain guarantee violation and the actions of a man who has spent too much time in the sun, pixel peeping. Well he does call his company Miller and Miller which suggests a measure of schizophrenia.

James is a friend and business partner of Philip Bloom and a pioneer in the world of DSLR cameras. We met once but I doubt he will remember because at the time he was salivating over the recently released Canon C300 and cradling it like a child. Inwardly I'm sure he was harbouring thoughts of dismemberment and performing lewd operations using a mini hex key and a soldering iron. I imagine the gaps between the floorboards in his house are forever swallowing up the miniature screws that keep our cameras together - his are in one piece through the arts of origami and gaffer taping.

The results of this camera butchery can be seen on his website mmfilm and some of it is quite beautiful and really shouldn't be possible using the same camera that I own, namely the Canon 5D MKIII. But his latest experiment is one that I might be willing to try since it doesn't involve physical removal of parts and is provided by Magic Lantern, a group of people who produce software that runs inside many Canon cameras to give features that many of us would give our right testicle for. Fortunately there is no need for such drastic surgery because the software is free.

The latest version works on the 5D MKIII and seemingly doesn't turn the camera into a large paperweight but offers lots of useful options like an intervalometer and bulb ramping for time lapsers and zebra levels, waveform monitors and overlays for video shooters. A full list of functionality can be found here.

This week James released a short "film" on Vimeo called Genesis which was shot on a Canon 5D MKIII (previously taken apart in an earlier, seemingly successful experiment) with the Magic Lantern software installed. What I hadn't mentioned was that the ML software allows the camera to record its footage in a RAW format, Canon's own DNG, in a series of still frames, creating in effect a timelapse, albeit one with 25 frames per second - which eats up 4 GB every minute. This allowed the footage to be imported into After Effects using Adobe Camera RAW and its powerful grading functionality, which is the process I use for my timelapses found here. 

He then exported each clip as a ProRes video and edited in Adobe Premiere. Here is the wonderful video (now a Vimeo Staff Pick no less) entirely shot with a Canon 5D MKIII and a Canon 70-200 L IS II lens, please expand it to full screen or follow the above link to James' Vimeo page:



James appeared only to have shot this as a test, but some of the shots are pieces of art, technically superb and wonderfully framed. He mentions the use of IR contamination which is something most of us would avoid but James uses it on the evening sun to stunning effect. Even viewing the film compressed on Vimeo leaves me impressed and goes to prove that the better the source material the better the final video whether it is H.264 or Blu-ray.

James pushes the boundaries far further than us bi-testicled mortals and hopefully Canon will see that they shouldn't restrict the quality of their brilliant DSLRs to protect their high-end cameras, because Magic Lantern and James will bring the revolution to their door. I expect the 5D MKIII to be spitting out 4K video by the end of the year, it will just take a pioneer like James to make it happen. 

The evangelists and agnostics of 4K video

One of the best things about editing TV programmes is that you get to see them in the best quality possible straight out of the edit suite. With a broadcaster approved monitor and a fast computer the pictures often look great - the only thing that would make them better is watching them from a comfy sofa - perks of an executive producer, not a humble editor.

At home I have Sky HD which is pretty good and Freeview which isn't. I also have a powerful computer which plays out my 4K timelapses in Cineform QuickTime and suddenly everything before looks inadequate. I don't have a 4K monitor but the detail on a decent HD TV is amazing - you can almost smell the congestion zone in some of my London shots.

But not everybody thinks 4K is a necessary step for the future. Philip Bloom has this to say:

"8K is the future. Not 4k. Now don’t get me wrong – 4k is smashing, but the difference between 2K (essentially full HD) and 4k is not the leaps and bounds that we had from SD to HD. Not to my old eyes, and by the time we all have 8K, won’t see a bloody thing but THIS is the progress leap that will make the difference."

But for Jim Jannard the founder of Red the release of new 4K Sony cameras is confirmation that 4K will be as big as HD:

"Sony has come to the party. God love them. The F65 is a true 4K camera (although not 8K as it is advertised). The F5 and F55 are 4K cameras soon to be released. There are 4K display panels being released. 4K projectors. The world is finally coming to its senses. We predicted this 6 years ago. Now it is here" 

Now Philip Bloom and Jim Jannard have rarely sung from the same hymn sheet but I expected cordiality over this one. I have seen material projected in 4K from the Canon 1D C and the Canon C500 and it looks pretty fantastic but then it had the best post production money can buy so it should. 

It is over 6 years since Sky launched HD transmission in the UK so I feel we are due an upgrade and 8K is just too far removed from practicality, but material is being filmed, edited and shown in 4K right now. It is the near future and I feel every TV production company should start to look to that future.

Time - it’s never running at the right speed

Of all the various ways of measuring things, Time is generally the most important or critical, at least it is to me. Size doesn't matter, distance can be reduced or extended by speed and volume can be altered, sometimes by the flick of a dial. But Time, that little four letter word that I have given a capital "T", has a mind of its own and will never change, despite the best efforts of the Large Hadron Collider scientists.

Twenty-four hours a day, Time rules my world; where I have to be, what I have to do, what has to be finished, deadlines. I can't change these. I ask for one more minute to finish editing a piece and if I get it I lose a minute from the next Time period. The producer tells me we are on air in five minutes and EVS need the cut in three. I need six, but somehow I finish in four and we get to air. Yes! I beat Time, kind of.

So with all these Time pressures, why on earth do I love making Time lapse sequences? Because, let's face it, the world looks much better when slowed right down or sped right up. It's boring at normal speed, that's so everyday, so dull. In slow motion you can see things missed in real Time. Footage from the Phantom Flex or Hi-Mo cameras analyse movement in a beautiful and intriguing way.Timelapses truncate Time and let you see in thirty seconds what took hours or even days to actually happen. You can't comprehend that as a human, so to see a flower opening, a bridge being built or even the view from the highest building in the world (see Philips Bloom's fabulous film) is a miracle because it manipulates Time.

So I am bored of the speed at which I live and want to control it and if I can't become a Time Lord, then timelapse photography is the closest I am likely to get.To see some of my attempts to control Time go to my Vimeo site at http://vimeo.com/pukkatv/videos