Finally procured the Canon 7D. After watching some fantastic footage on Philip Bloom’s website and countless other examples on Youtube, actually I was pretty much sold on the idea of using DSLR cameras to shoot films with since watching REVERIE on Canon’s website, although this showcases the 5D Mark II, the technical differences between this camera and the 7D are merely subtle with the exception of considerably larger sensor size ( 35mm vs 22mm ) and a heftier price tag ( aprox €1,000 more ). With the 7D, it’s now a lot easier to transfer films from the camera straight to the editing equipment since it takes is a memory card reader and a few seconds to transfer. Being able to change the lens is also a great bonus since it allows for pretty flexible filming styles. More importantly the camera works fantastically well in low light conditions.
Despite my praises the camera still has its shortcomings, first off it’s a lot more uncomfortable to shoot with since the ergonomics weren’t designed for handheld shooting in mind. The CMOS sensor is subjected to the Rolling Shutter effect when it comes to sudden movements such as quick panning effects, although fixable through editing tools like Virtualdub when used with Deshaker for example, it’s still going to add a layer of tediousness to some footage that features a lot of motion. Canon 7D is also limited to a recording filesize of 4 GB and it doesn’t even bother rolling back to a new file once the limit has been reached. According to some articles on the web, some users experienced overheating during the video recording although this seems likely to happen when shooting at lower resolutions according to this blog post.
Here’s some early test footage ( shrunk down to 540P and then heavily compressed by Vimeo )
It takes nice images too.
Leave a Reply