In Final Cut Pro if I create a similar sequence and then drag in some DSLR source clips things immediately become unresponsive. The timeline needs rendering and my mac struggles to play the sequence back. Adding any kind of transition or effect makes things a lot worse with rendering required at every stage.

Premiere Pro however handled the native DSLR footage with ease. I did a quick edit, dropped in some cross fades, applied some 3-way colour correction and a bit of blur here and there and not once did I have to render anything in order to watch it play back smoothly. Very impressive!

I must admit to being very tempted to splash out on a license but changing NLE’s is a very tough thing when you’ve gotten used to a specific workflow and I feel very at home with Final Cut. Seeing what Adobe has achieved just heightens my frustration with Apple for their apparent lack of advancement of the Pro apps and I’m definitely not going to keep plodding away in Final Cut for long knowing the competition is so far ahead.

If you’ve also seen similar issues or don’t suffer from it then please leave a comment, it might help to nail down the cause of the problems.

UPDATE – 26/08/2010

Canon has just announced an update to the EOS E1 plugin which is due for release in September. According to Canon the update adds support for their new 60D body. Of much more interest to me though is the announcement that it will also provide support for multi-core processing. Just in time for my shiny new 12 core!

Lets hope they fix the above bugs too!

One thing that is a bit annoying when using Fader ND’s though is that it’s no longer possible to attach the Canon sun hoods that are supplied with the lenses.

While I was out shooting some external pickup shots yesterday I experimented with using a Hoya Screw in Rubber lens Hood on my 50mm 1.2 and 35mm 1.4 lenses. It’s quite strange using these on the fader ND because to adjust the level of ND you end up rotating the entire lens hood, it works well though!

The Hoya hoods are able to be set in two positions allowing you to use them with a range of lenses from medium wides out to zooms.

Unfortunately the Hoya hoods only go up to 77mm which means they can only be used on lenses up to 72mm in diameter because the Fader ND’s step up a size. Both my 35mm 1.4 and 50mm 1.2 have a 72mm thread so the 77mm Hoya Hood work well on those. On the 35mm the hood needed to be in it’s closed down setting so that it didn’t appear in the shot on my 5D mark2.

My 24mm 1.4 and 70 – 200 2.8 are 77mm so with a 77mm fader ND fitted the hoods won’t work on those as the required diameter is then 82mm. The 24mm would likely be too wide for the sun hood anyway, plus the Fader ND’s are not recommended on long zooms so you probably wouldn’t want to use the hoods on either of those lenses anyway.

By far the best feature of the Hoya hoods has to be the red line on the end – full on L series looks for just a few $! ;)

Buying in the US: B&H sell the Hoya hoods for around $25.

Buying in the UK: Warehouse express sell the Hoya hoods priced from £12 – £40 depending on size.

If you’re looking for Fader ND filters they can be purchased from B&H for $62 – £139 depending on the lens diameter you need.

My kit and workflow was exactly as described previously in my DSLR Workflow post. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to post a comment and ask.

I’ve created two video tutorials showing two different approaches to conforming video clips with Cinema Tools, one describing batch conforming and the other showing how to conform individual clips from within Final Cut Pro.

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As you can see in the DSLR workflow article I just wrote the actual workflow is very similar between the two types of camera when it comes to importing footage now that Canon has released their E1 plugin. In essence the plugin works identically to the XDCAM-EX version from Sony.

To give you an idea of the speed difference between MPEG Streamclip and the Canon EOS plugin E1 I ran a quick test using a 5 minute 16 second 5D2 file on my Mac Pro. To be fair this mac is getting towards the end of it’s lifespan but it’s a quad core 2.66Ghz machine with 8GB RAM so still fairly beefy.

You can see that MPEG Streamclip transcoded this clip in 7:38 whereas the E1 plugin took 10:27.

However compare this to a 5:24 import of an XDCAM-EX clip from my EX1 and you see a very big difference indeed…

Yes that’s right, over 5 minutes of XDCAM-EX imports in just under a minute. It’s interesting because the ingest speed was one of the biggest factors that made a solid state workflow seem so much better than tape. Being able to import at high speed is a massive benefit of the XDCAM-EX system.

It’s amazing how quickly we forget the importance of this with our flashy new DSLR’s where we’re importing our solid state files at double the amount of time it actually took us to shoot the footage!

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