Charlie Everywhere (now Phantogram), one of my favorite local band, playing at Circus Cafe in Saratoga Springs NY.

This is a test video with a Canon 5D Mark II (second test here: vimeo.com/2641870). The flickering is actually produced by a pretty intense strobe light I was standing next to, nothing to blame the 5D for (yet). The place was packed, I had to handheld. It was also extremely dark, except for short strobe bursts, which made it pretty difficult to shoot in both cases.

I brought my fastest lens, a 50mm f/1.4, stuck to a very small aperture at ISO 5000 (down to 3200?), and I'm still amazed by the amount of light the camera managed to capture.

It's going to be fun and challenging shooting videos with this DSLR. Notice the details on Josh's beard as he goes in and out the focus plane at 0:55, and compare to the video I captured with my Powershot SD870IS a few months earlier:
vimeo.com/1636135

The embedded mic saturated pretty quickly. Focusing needs careful planning. I used auto-focus mode for most of the video, then fiddled with manual-focus at the end.

The 5D produces a tremendous amount of data, recording at full 1920x1080p HD, 30fps. Adobe Premiere CS4 chocked on the footage on both my computers at home, I could not edit it in any interesting ways. I just dropped 6 clips in the timeline, added a few transitions at random and it still took about 45 mins to render the whole clip down to 1280x720p in H264. Ouch. Vimeo compresses it even further, but feel free to download the original 128MB file, it looks pretty clean.

Update: in my second test (vimeo.com/2641870) I describe in more details how proxy files can be used to make one's life a little easier in Premiere. It's very nerdy.

Charlie Everywhere on MySpace:
myspace.com/charlieeverywhere2

Charlie Everywhere on Facebook:
facebook.com/pages/Charlie-Everywhere/22053189127?ref=mf