HI docray, you are right of course the D90 is a terrific camera as well and it's over £1,200 cheaper in the UK!

angus

Angus, next time you will check the audio, something in the back of my head tells me that!
I gladly watch it again!
(Maybe create an account for your brother? I know you can help him out with his first upload!)

weedze

Qman,

Maybe you could download the original film, than you can see that something has to do with the vimeo player, the banding in the bluesky is a compresion issue.

weedze

Hi Q_man,

yeah I did notice that. There are some compression issues with Vimeo although it is way better than you tube. The difficulty with the footage from this camera is that it shoots at 1920 x 1440 but reading the encoding criteria for Vimeo all HD video's have to be uploaded at 720p and not the camera's native 1080p.
angus

Hey Angus!

About banding issues, I think hi ISO settings are quite innocent. Every smooth flat ramp tends to band once encoded, because encoder try to simplify smooth ramp by packets of same values.
Banding occurs even on your H264 file, but at a lower level.
In fact, even uncompressed 8bit YUV is prone to banding, since 8bit sampling is definitely too low to reproduce finest grades.
The only serious solution to avoid completely banding is working with 10bit codecs, in a 10/16bit workflow.

About the pictures, seeing that DoF is just magic. The overall light response is also quite perfect. Did you color correct them ? Please, tell me you didn't...
Then sensivity is just amazing. Night shots are terrific.

Hi dave,


Thanks for the DOF comments. We made a deliberate decision not to colour correct or apply any kind of grading or film effect, so the footage you are looking at is straight off the camera.

The sensitivity is great. It's lovely to shoot with in low light.

best

angus

Hi Henry,

the camera definitely shoots progressive scan. Obviously there is compression because the h.2264 codec mean the footage is highly optimised. In storage terms this is great because 1 hour 10 minutes 1920 1080p high def footage only took up 10 gig on my hard drive.

Angus.

can you plz PM me with a link if you can?

much appreciated!!

Hi Mei Lai,

I think so. Unfortunately the test camera we got to use didn't have the manual and Alan just set it to its highest resolution mode because that's what we wanted to test.

Angus

Sorry that should have read targa sequences nearly always work.

Thanks Tynan, we weren't sold on it completely ourselves till we made it, now we are both convinced. It was kind of an afterthought of Canon's to add video to this model which you can tell by some of the limitations (i.e. 30fps and no 25fps mode), however the basic strengths of the camera are there to see. The way it handles light is just extraordinary.

angus.

I did a little test converting a couple of your shots from 30p to 25p:

vimeo.com/2069928

Hi Gregory,

Thanks for your comments. I think the reason it doesn't look like video is that Alan was filming according to the strength of the camera and using a lot of natural light. I think this camera is so sensitive that when lighting for it it may well be that less is a lot more. If I were lighting scenes for this camera for example, I'd certainly start with minimal lighting setups and then gently add light, as possibly too much light could make the colours oversaturate and become too brassy. The trick for shooting with this camera is therefore to trust the look you get in camera by locking the ISO to whichever bright or dark area of the image you want to set it to, doing little or no grading in post. Shame though because £2,200 is still around £1,200 more than the price of the D90 and I've also seen nice stuff coming from that camera.

Thanks for the link from Prolost

best wishes,

angus.

Angus, if you use the replace feature, your upload quota will only be affected by the difference between your old and new version...

hi mark..
that seems like a very usable lens set..
to be honest the real expensive canon glass is kind of over kill cos of the resolving power of even the poorest glass..
i am sure 30 year old lens would look stunning if we could go manual with the iris..which we cannot at the moment...

Hi helminthes,

I've looked at Reverie few times and I think its down to the indivdual grading, lighting and look the cameraman wanted. There are a few shots with reflections, backlit steam etc and I think its probably the case that the 5D is just so sensitive to light that if you go into it lighting as you would normally on say a 35mm shoot, then there may simply be too much light.

I think the difference is an individual style thing. I'm fairly sure everyone using this camera creatively will come up with a look of their own.

Angus.

Thanks very much.

A

This camera is definitely nice!

A

Hi zhuang,

this is the dilema, you can't lock the aperture and you can't selectively lock the ISO either. You have to point it around the image to get the ISO reading you want then lock it.

However it does work, just requires faith.

Angus

HI Matthias,

I didn't say final cut sucks. I just agreed that premier rocks. I use final cut and avid and premier and from an editing perspective I just prefer premier and generally I prefer premier's media encoder for flash rendering and also I do a lot of after effects work so premier suits me. The h.64 codec is a fairly new codec for people to be editing directly on the timeline and as both the codec and final cut were apple inventions you'd expect it to work. I've actually heard from another final cut editor who's a pal of mine that he's had a lot of problems importing footage from the same camera because it is jerky on the timeline but he's only got an older dual processor Mac system and I also read another thread somewhere on the web about this camera where the editor (on a final cut system) was saying the only way he could get the footage to work was to render it to an intermediary apple editing format, so maybe having a quad processor g5 is the solution. I'd be interested to hear how you go with importing the footage directly from the camera and if the h.264 camera footage from the camera plays or whether you have any problems with it. I edited on a quad machine however it was a fairly low spec 3d workstation with a graphics card optimised for 3d not editing so I didn't get the chance to test it on a more advanced graphics card like a matrox x2 so I was posting the workaround. Hopefully in future versions of premier (i haven't tested CS4 yet) h.264 will be more native.

I'm just trying to give as much info about the working process we used on this film as possible. I haven't used cinelerra so I'm not sure what the issues with that system might be.

best wishes,

angus.

Sorry, that didn't come across right: My slightly emotionally charged comment was a reply to "Oliver Lavery-Farag"s post up there.
Concerning your question: Yes, my experience with the Reverie Clips is with a Quad Core 2.66MHz Mac Pro. And the h264 Clips do play without stutter in the timeline. Only slight problem is when viewing them in fullscreen (Command+F12) the graphics card's hardware seems to stutter a bit while the host CPUs are barely loaded. NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT seems to be a tad too slow.
And yes you can trancode to Apple Intermediate Codec, which makes things significantly more fluid. But which I wouldn't do for all kinds of projects. Interesting detail: the h264 footage straight from the 5D and the transcoded footage have roughly the same bandwidth.
Bottom line: On a current Mac Pro there is no need for any kind of workaround, you just do your stuff. On a more moderate machine, like an iMac, you would probably want to do intermediates first, but I'm not even sure about that.
Did I mention that I loved your video? Even the shameless plug for Volkswagen.. ;-), I am guilty of that too: vimeo.com/899180

Hey Matthias,

No problem at all. I'm just really pleased and suprised with all the response to this film. We just did it as a quick test because Alan wanted to test the camera. It's great in this day and age that you can make a film and get such instant feedback.

In terms of editing I think premier will probably take some time to catch up to apple on this because I guess using h.264 as an editing codec as opposed to an acquisition codec wasn't in their immediate game plan. There's no intermediary format I'm so far aware of in Premier. Usually something like this I'd try and do on a system with a hardware accelerated graphics solution, however my studio is in a container on the sea on the way to Sydney where I'm moving so I only had an older workstation and I'm not sure it was completely up to the job.

I do like apple since they brought out OS 10 onwards. I was a heavy apple user system 7 to 9 but went off them because their upgrade path seemed to deliberately make the older machine irrelevant. Got to admit you get some lovely apple machines and useful software with them now so I was thinking in investing in a g5 at some stage in the future. If I have a final cut project which is rare I tend to cut on my friend Tim's edit suite and he's a completely non-technical editor so I always have FC issues I can't resolve because I'm not native to it.

It's like everything. I bet if I used final cut day in and out I would get to know all the fine tuning of the processes and all the shortcuts. I'm at that stage with premier and the h.264 codec and its challenges were a new one to me.

thanks for your support of the film. We're hoping it gets people realising that this camera could be a great a cam for shooting everything (commercials, music videos, drama, documentary etc.) instead of just being a stills cam with some video capability.

I gues the technological device that's uniting us is the 5D. What else could bring Mac and PC users together!

best wishes,

angus.

Hi Tony,

thanks so much for all the info and the response. I wasn't aware when I posted this film of the kind of response I was going to get. I honestly thought maybe fifty people would view it. Two things that tells me 1. Vimeo rocks. 2. Vimeo communities are really powerful.

lots of nice people on this forum!

best wishes,

angus.

thanks Angus,
I would imagine if the camera had a standard zoom lens on it when they gave it to you it would be the 24-105L F4 (I have this one its great) as this is often paired with the 5D as a "kit" lens.
Im hoping to god they ship enough of these for me to get mine by the holiday season!

Thanks! That's down to Alan the cameraman who shot it and who's footage it is.

Hi Wojtek,

All the DOF was in camera, not in post. Also we didn't colour correct or post process the footage in any way. What you see is what came straight off the camera. It was, literally, too good to change.

angus

Did someone test the 5D indoor in a 50 Hz country?

i have not seen any major flicker issues in my tests in london..in various interior scenes involving household lighting in street lighting in central london have seen some minor problems...i hope canon give us 25fps