Hello readers!
Sorry again for the delay in this weeks post, but I've been fighting a nasty cold since last weekend. Luckily, I'm starting to feel normal. But man what I'd pay for a clear head!
Love, Concord Scheduled
Debbie Brubaker has written a preliminary schedule for principal photography of the feature. While I've literally just received it and haven't had a chance to fully dive into some important aspects about it popped up immediately. First off, she predicts we'll need 27 days to shoot instead of the 15 days I'd been hoping for. While this is a significant difference from my goal, I believe there's room to work her 27 days down to something more close to what I'd like. On a side note, when I originally started planning this project I actually gave myself one full month to shoot it all, so perhaps my initial prediction was pretty accurate (insert Gus shrugging shoulders).
Debbie's almost done with the budget for the project so I'm really looking forward to reading that and sitting down with her and Virginia to further discuss the project. More on that to come later.
Live Event Shoot Shows Weaknesses in 7D
This weekend my faithful and trusted former student and fellow videographer Jimmy Freeman used the Canon 7D to shoot a speaker for Virginia McCarthy's forthcoming documentary. The shoots allowed us to really test the 7D's ability to do live event recording. Here's what happened.
Jimmy used the 7D as a "B-Cam" to shoot several speakers at a church in San Francisco. The speakers in total spoke for over an hour. To record their audio the 7D was patched into its 1/4" mic plug from a mixer which was receiving mic audio from the microphone where the speakers spoke from. Right off the bat, the frustrating thing about the 7D is the lack of real audio control. There's no headphone jack to confirm it's receiving signal, and there's no level indicators to monitor how low or high your signal is recording. You're virtually left to a guessing game estimation or recording a little bit of footage and then playing it back to see if it recorded audio.
Once audio was done being troubleshooted, Jimmy began shooting the speakers and ran into the next issue with the 7D. The manual states the longest any single shot can be is 29min 59secs or 4GB whichever comes first. Therefore, Jimmy had to stop the recording every 29mins even though he had 16GB compact flash cards. The other issue is since there's only one card slot, to swap out a full card he lost whatever was happening. Again, since he was shooting the "B-cam" footage this wasn't too big an issue, but a noteworthy one nonetheless.
The next morning when Jimmy set about capturing the footage, he ran into a major snag. The movie files were not being recognized by his Mac and we both suspected the large file size had something to do with it. After doing some internet research, Jimmy discovered the 7D apparently suffers from overheating issues when recording long shots. Well this was may have been news to both of us, but it didn't help the fact we still had several 29 minute shots we needed downloaded.
Luckily, Jimmy still had two more 16GB cards to record the next event and this time he limited his shots to no more than five minutes in length. This definitely did the trick in terms of being able to download the footage with no problems. However, I'm still yet to get the original shoot's footage off (mostly because I've been too sick to try). But Jimmy was able to start getting some of the original long footage off by using the camera's built in clip editor to shorten the shots into smaller parts. He also installed the Canon software that came with the camera, which also allowed him to pull off some more footage. I plan to do a combination of these two solutions and I'll write about my progress in next weeks article.
Well after this ordeal, it's obvious the 7D is not meant to do live events. This camera would still be a great "B" camera to do an event with, so long as it's clear to everyone the footage will be nothing more than "cut away" footage. If you need a 2nd camera to sync up with your main unit, the 7D is NOT for you when it comes to a live event.
Stay tuned for more experiments with the 7D as well as more results from our future head to head dual with the Sony EX-1.
Until then everyone have a great weekend!
Forward!
-Gustavo
What kind of CF cards are you using? Supposedly you're not supposed to use anything slower than 40 mb/sec, otherwise you can see the bar on the right side of the LCD screen going up and up until it has to stop.
ReplyDeleteThe cards were fast enough; that line on the side never even came up. The main thing was really that just after, say, maybe 15 minutes of continous footage, the camera would get the overheating warning, and I think that may have corrupted the files or something, but I can't really say for sure.
ReplyDeleteThe cards are 533x speed. So that's easily more than 40 mb per. sec. It shot great footage, it's just not a long take camera I think. Or who knows, maybe these cards are too fast.
ReplyDeleteIt's just essentially a DSLR camera at its core, so the chip's gonna run hot. And without a cooling system that'll cause some problems on long takes.
ReplyDeleteCurious if there's a difference in heat management between shooting 720 and 1080