Canon Eos 5D MkII Video Test

Recently, my boss at Blue Sky Event & Media bought a brand-spanking new Canon 5D. You might know the 5D as one of the most exciting DSLRs to hit the market for quite some time, sending videographers and directors weak at the knees over its mighty fine HD video recording and jaw-droppingly shallow depth of field shots (which appears to be a very 'in' style of shooting at the moment judging by the new series of Doctor Who and Top Gear). Producing 'cinema quality' images for a fraction of the price of your typical, broadcast quality video-camcorder, it has contributed heavily to a flurry of HD art-house films hitting the likes of Vimeo. The Canon 5D produces remarkably beautiful images. All that has been added to the raw footage has been a basic vignette and colour grading. The whole film probably took only about half a day to shoot, edit and export.

Even so, a few problems reared their ugly head whilst I was making this film. The first being that the 5D is not ergonomically suitable in any way to shoot video. Adaptive autofocus is absent when the camera is in Live-View mode and focusing a HD image, with a low depth-of-field, on a screen of about 1.5" is a hit and miss process. If you want to expand that cinematic depth-of-field, the camera will adapt by raising the ISO, so you'll likely end up with a grainier image. Oh, and forget about any decent sound from the tiny internal microphone - it's not intended for any serious use and an external microphone or separate sound kit is a must have if you are considering making films on it.

The second dose of problems becomes apparent when you start to edit. The H.264 encoded files that the camera records to are not a suitable format to edit with on most systems (believe me, I tried), so everything must be converted to Apple ProRes 422 before Final Cut can touch it. This sensibly requires Compressor, which knocks my dual-core MacBook Pro with Final Cut Express out of the picture fairly early. Converting to ProRes takes up a lot of time and storage, certainly in comparison to capturing DV from tape, so if you've recorded a lot you'll either want to be selective about what you convert or leave your machine chugging through it overnight.

Editing with such large files requires some expansive system resources, so the quad-core Intel Mac Pro that I was editing with suddenly presented itself as a bit old-hat, Final Cut proclaiming that certain filters and transitions weren't possible to render on such a weedy graphics card. Those renders that can be performed have processing times that are roughly doubled (or even tripled) when compared so working on a standard-definition timeline.

If you're experiencing similar problems of Final Cut complaining about your graphics card, you might like to know that graphics card upgrades for the Mac Pro are not cheap or easy to come by if Apple no longer stocks the part. Few graphics cards have been produced that support the chipsets in Apple machines. Of course, if you're getting these problems on any other Apple machine, such as an iMac, MacBook or MacBook Pro then you might be even more irritated to be learn that only Mac Pros have upgradable graphics circuitry (assuming that you didn't know that already).

Once you've completed wrestling together your masterpiece, you then have to export it as a whopping Quicktime Movie. These 43 seconds alone spanned across around 850MB of hard-disk space. The irony of it all is that you're probably going to do what I did and export the thing to a video sharing website such as Vimeo, which means that you'll be wanting to convert it back to its original H.264 format.

Work-flows will undoubtedly improve as system specs catch up with HD requirements, but for the moment this is a very time consuming process to produce what might be very little.

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My personal favourite of the series shows Mark investigating the threat to St Stephens Sports & Social Club.

The interior lighting of St Steven's was less than ideal for shooting in, despite using a camera-mounted lamp, but I managed to brighten up shots using the 'Top Gear' effect, as illustrated in Jude Cotter's tutorial. I've actually used this effect a lot over the last year-or-so, as it gives a similar effect to a vignette, whilst providing more control and variables.

Coming back to the embedded film, it was edited by myself. The majority of the sound was also recorded by myself with a boom-mic.

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The fifth instalment of a series of programmes produced by Blue Sky Event & Media in order to promote Mark Coote's election campaign.

This film was edited by myself. Much of the sound was also recorded by myself with a boom-mic.

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This episode, Mark expresses his intentions to fight to protect the green spaces of Gloucestershire.

The film was edited by myself. The majority of the sound was also recorded by myself with a boom-mic.

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After the initial success of my first programme, local Conservative candidate MP, Mark Coote commissioned Blue Sky to do a further six for him. They'll be posted up on his website once a week, in the lead-up to the local election.



For this first episode, we visited Pate's Grammar School in Cheltenham, where Mark used to attend, and catch up with one of his ex-teachers.

The film was edited by myself. The majority of the sound was also recorded by myself with a boom-mic.

Mark Coote

Behold! The fruits of my labour, now available on Youtube and Markcoote.co.uk!


A short film made to support the local Conservative electoral candidate, Mark Coote. Edited by myself, working for Blue Sky Event and Media, Cheltenham.