Adventures in videography

I was hired by the Open Youth Trust in Norwich to produce a short promotional video highlighting their recently opened £12m venue in the heart of Norwich.

This was the first project where I used my new Canon 5dmkII alongside my trusty Sony EX1. The images produced by these two cameras are quite different, although I really like the fact that they allow me to show two different perspectives in interviews, not only from a camera’s point of view, but also with such a different feel to the images due to the shallow depth of field the 5D produces. All of the 5D shots were done with a 50mm f1.2 L series lens.

Because the 5D shoots 30p and the EX1 25p I had to conform the footage from the 5D accordingly. I did this in two ways. For interview shots I transcoded the footage to XDCAM-EX/25p using Episode Pro, this does a good job of reducing the frame rate whilst not causing me any syncing issues. It does however take a lot of rendering time.

For the remaining shots I simply used cinema tools to change the frame rate, effectively slowing the footage down slightly, which because it’s only a meta data change is a very fast process.

Hopefully Canon will release the updated firmware for the 5D quite early in 2010 and then things will be a lot easier as the camera will be able to shoot 25p directly.