More Canon 5D Mark II video

Canon's 5D Mark II remains a hot topic.

Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape has a preview of the Canon 5D Mk II, as well as a demo video. The video is mostly him talking about the camera, but there's some clips at the end. Definitely read the article, as it's mostly about the video features. Some interesting notes:

  • He found that a 15 second sample clip was captured at 47 Mbps and was 80MB in size. When translated to Apple Intermediate Codec this expanded to 169 MB
  • Though QuickTime 7 could playback the video, there were dropped frames on his 2.6Ghz dual core Macbook Pro with 2 Meg of RAM,
  • He didn't see any real "Jelly" problem

It's important to note that this was with a pre-production model that he had for only a day.

From the video, the notable thing is that there's no obvious movie record mode on the camera (or even a button!) You go to Live-View and then click the set button to start recording. This is interesting as it almost suggests that the video feature was an add-on. My PowerShot S5 at least has a dedicated start/stop video recording button!

He really raves about the low-light performance, and talks about how this is the start of convergence of DSLRs and video cameras. He's right, though I really think an SLR is not a great body shape for shooting video; it's too unwieldy.

The demo video is great; you get a good idea of depth-of-field control and light performance. You also feel like he needed to use a tripod for several of the scenes!!

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