Forget the 5D and the 7D. This is the new hot shit in the market: Canon’s Rebel T2i (aka 550D).

For $800, you will be able to get a great camera to shoot your masterpiece. You have no excuse anymore to not shoot a short movie, or a music video to help out your local rock bands.

The T2i supports all the frame rates that the 7D does, at similar bitrates. It has full manual control, and an audio jack. No new video-focused abilities are present in the cam compared to the 7D, however, it’s a camera that’s half the price. The still picture side of it is not as powerful as the 7D, but when it comes to video, it’s up to par with it (sample). It’s also a smaller/lighter camera than than the 7D, using SDHC instead of CF.

Add in the mix a large-aperture prime, a wide-angle, and a zoom lens, and you’ll be in business. My [photographer] husband would suggest instead three prime lenses: one wide, one normal, one long (a good combo is 24-35-50mm). You should be able to buy the camera and three lenses of your choice for $1500 overall, which is a great price if you think that a high-end Canon AVCHD camcorder, or the 7D body alone, costs as much. Honestly, I think the Scarlet is in a bit more market trouble right now — even if it’s a much better camera. “Good enough” is what sells more actually. I see plain camcorders to also be in real trouble now. Except wedding photographers and travelers, the camcorder market will down-size significantly in the next few years.

Canon also announced their new digicam line today, which actually let me down. Their SX200 IS replacement digicam, the SX210 IS, is now 14 MP — at the same sensor size. The SX200 IS has low light problems, so stuffing more pixels in it will make things even worse. They added “zooming while recording” and a “stereo mic” as new abilities for the movie mode. Personally, I find these useless as a filmmaker. Actors only have one mouth, and zooming while recording is as cheesy as 70’s B-movies were. I would have preferred to see a 10 MP sensor instead, and the ability to also record at 24 fps in addition to 30 fps. That would have been more useful to the kinds of video I shoot (i.e. not random family videos).

So as far as P&S HD video digicams go, the SD780 IS remains the best bang for the buck for $180. Except of manual focus, it still has all the video features that the SX-series have.

Official music video for “Solomon”, by the San Francisco rock band As A People. You can download the song for free at the band’s site, or the HD video at Vimeo.

I had immense fun shooting this video, the band was really cool, and the song rocks. I consider it the most complex, and best video work of mine so far. I learned a few new things about the process, and I believe that the next step for me as a videographer is rigorous story-boarding, and having a grander plan. It’s the only way to avoid weak spots of continuity, like the ones found on the first 30 seconds of the video.

I shot the video with a Canon 5D Mark II, at 30 fps, and then slowed it down at 24 fps. I can’t wait for Canon to at last release the 24p firmware, it’s a long time waiting. It was my first major video with the 5D. Overall shooting time was 3 hours.

On location tools: a tripod, and a shoulder rest. A single Canon 50mm f1.4 lens was used. Software tools used were Sony Vegas Pro, Cineform, Magic Bullet (tools that didn’t always want to co-operate very well, so editing took quite some time: crashing, and bugs).

Many thanks to my beloved husband, Jean-Baptiste, for his support and feedback. I wouldn’t be able to do jack without him.

I shot the following interview with the Bay Area band Geographer last Sunday, for The OWL Mag. One of the tracks heard on the video below is unreleased as of yet. I shot it using the Canon HV20, since I had to save the battery of my Canon 5D MkII for the As A People music video that I shot an hour later after this interview. It was a busy Sunday. But I loved it.

The following video, shot with the Canon 5D MarkII, contains snippets from a video I shot at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco last Friday, for As A People, a local post-punk and politically charged band. Parts of the live recording will be used for the music video I’m putting together for the band. The second part of the shoot, under a day light, will take place soon. The track we shoot the music video for is “Solomon” (free download here).

As you probably know, it’s important to shoot “flat” with your video camera, in order to help color grading in post, especially if you’re after the “film look”. Since I got the Canon 5D MarkII, I made sure I shoot as flat as possible: with the “Neutral” color setting, modified to have the contrast/saturation/sharpness settings on minimum, and its tint on +1.

So far, I’ve only shot two videos with the 5D, and I was not happy with the visual result. Yes, its picture quality is amazing for the price, but as the occasional filmmaker & colorist that I am, I need the kind of look directly out of the camera that I could get with a film camera, or the RED One. And the 5D, with tricked out color settings, it would still not give me what I wanted: the videos came out over-saturated, and over-contrasty for my taste. Sure, the videos were magnitudes less contrasty/saturated than when using the “auto” color modes, but they were still not what I wanted.

I tweeted about it yesterday, and some people suggested I try the Canon Picture Style Editor, which lets you edit these parameters even more. So I downloaded this famous package, which includes a Panalog-like curve (which I didn’t like), Marvel’s EX1-like Cine curve, one called “superflat”, and a pseudo-Velvia one.

Well, I’m still not happy with the results. None of these downloadable styles are what I wanted exactly, and to make the matter worse, the curve utility inside the Picture Style Editor sucks goats: you can’t move the two edges of the curve. Photoshop’s curve dialog can do it, but Canon’s utility can’t. Because of that, it’s impossible to get more detail in the dark places directly out of the camera. You see, whatever you can do IN-camera, is MUCH more desirable than doing it in post processing. IN-camera processing is higher quality, so what you get out of it is purer, and doesn’t bring out as much the h.264 artifacts when lowering contrast in post. But without a curve dialog that let’s me do more, I can’t tell the camera to shoot that way. To be fair, this feature didn’t need to exist in the past, because photographers don’t care about it, but filmmakers do. Now that dSLRs can shoot video, hopefully a better curve dialog will be implemented in the future by Canon.

So, I had to do with what I had. I edited Neil Stubbings’ “superflat” style, and created a new one called “ExtraFlat”. My version uses the “Neutral” look as a base instead, and it’s a tiny bit less contrasty, but a lot less saturated, and it doesn’t have the “red face” attribute of the video look. Of course, we should not forget that Canon uses extra processing when sizes down the sensor image to 1080p, but that’s a kind of processing we can’t control.

You can download the ExtraFlat style for your Canon vDSLR camera here. Instructions on how to upload it to your camera after unzipping it, here. Make sure the “EOS Utility” is installed on your computer. Check the ExtraFlat style compared to the rest.

Now, please don’t start commenting again about how you prefer the “standard” contrasty/saturated look. I don’t care if it looks better as a FINAL still picture. Don’t think of this frame grab as the end result. Video footage of any artistic work HAS to go through color grading, and for that, you need a FLAT look to work on.

Look at how the pros do it. Check this 2k frame grab, directly out of the RED One camera (ungraded). Notice how it’s extremely low-saturation, low-contrast, and the people’s skin is almost PINK-GREY and not red as the consumer camcorders do it (check this HV20 frame for reference). With a Canon consumer camcorder, even if you use Cinemode+custom color settings, it’ll still look red-ish, compared to what the RED ONE does. Panasonic consumer HD cams are way worse, since not only they don’t go as far in color settings, but their footage is processed to be very red by default.

With the ExtraFlat style I get almost what I want out of the 5D, but more dynamic range could be acquired in-camera if the curve dialog in the Picture Style Editor was better implemented. The camera CAN do it, we just don’t have a way to TELL it to do it right now.

Update: Shot a small video of me testing the flesh tones of the ExtraFlat today. It was flat and non-red alright! And it graded so nicely. Going through the various grading templates, it offered a very pleasant look, across the board.

This is a frame snapshot out of an already twice re-encoded 720p video, shot with the Canon SX200 IS. A friend of mine shot this recently, all “auto”. When light is adequate, the result is fabulous with these small Canon cams. Click for a larger PNG version.

Love it or hate it, it’s in fashion. As Stu Maschwitz many times explained on his blog, the “teal” color is used a lot in the last 10 years in Hollywood. Either as teal, or towards blue or green, but definitely not “natural” red though. I used the same convention for the music video I shot a few months ago.

Yesterday someone asked me how it was done, so I decided to put this blog post together. Click the following image to view the arranged Vegas plugins used.

FCC Disclaimer: The following are my very own personal & truthful opinions.

Enthusiasts usually want the latest and greatest. They often go and buy expensive camcorders, dSLRs, or even 35mm adapters for them, only to never use them again after the novelty wears thin (and I’ve been guilty of it too). Or, more often than not, they use them, but they never fully use the equipment on its best of its ability. I know people who bought an HV20, and yet they always shoot in “auto” mode. They don’t take advantage of all the other features and settings the camera has to offer.

As some of you know, I’m a fan of the Canon SX200 IS, a $300 digicam that shoots 720/30p, and has more video manual controls than any other P&S digicam (read my review about SX200 IS’ video mode here). Around the same time the SX200 IS was announced, Canon also announced the SD780 IS. The SD780 IS has almost the same manual controls the SX200 IS has: exposure compensation & locking, contrast/saturation/sharpness control, manual white balance, macro/infinite focus modes, and focus lock. The only thing that’s missing compared to the SX200 IS is that it doesn’t have a manual focus mode, and that its lens is smaller, therefore letting less light hitting the sensor (so it’s noisier). But it’s $200, compared to the SX200 IS’ $300, so it’s acceptable.

My point is that these cams shoot good-enough video for the kinds of videos most people shoot. There is no reason to buy a camcorder, or even a dSLR if you’re not really serious about video. While a few more options would be nice (e.g. additional 24p frame rate, shutter speed support), even without these features, these digicams can offer amazing quality for the price. All it requires is to know how to shoot properly.

I wish people stop buying these terrible digi-recorders instead. They buy a Flip HD or the Kodak Z-series, while these Canon cams are actually much better for the same price: they have optical zoom, they’re smaller, they shoot still pictures too, they have optical stabilization, better lenses, higher bitrate codec, some exposure control, and other settings. Apparently, they also have a better microphone than any digirecorder, or Panasonic/Kodak P&S digicam too. In fact, the Sony and Panasonic digicams announced today at CES still don’t offer all the Canon video features, and Sony seems to be playing with our nerves for using just 6 mbps bitrate for their 720/30p video capture! Consider Canon’s 24 mbps.

I found this useful add-on for the SD780 IS that allows you to attach an ND filter and sunhood. For $50 you can get all three. The ND filter would help bring down the shutter speed, that’s normally too high on these cams, and the sunhood would help to not get CCD light artifacts.

So, while I already own an SX200 IS, I’m thinking of buying an SD780 IS to shoot a music video for a local band. Sure, I own an HV20 and a 5D MkII too. But I want to use the SD780 IS as part of “a project”. A project that details how to shoot properly, and what you can do with these small cams, in order to get an acceptable result out of them. I just want to prove to many people that you don’t need the best tool to create something that’s viewable. It’s not the camera that matters, it’s how you use it. From the moment you have the minimum acceptable tool in your hands, then all it takes is talent, not hardware. This proof of concept idea will end up costing me over $200 (I will probably buy some extra batteries too), but if I can convince one consumer, and one rock band to go that route instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars in equipment they don’t really need, it might actually worth it.

What has both surprised me and saddened me deeply is that after relentlessly searching for “artistic” or “atmospheric”, let’s say, videos on Youtube and Vimeo that were shot with either the SX200 IS or the SD780 IS, I found almost nothing! Except my own SX200 IS videos on Vimeo and this video, I found nothing else similar around. Every person who bought these cams (and they’re a lot of them) seem to be busy shooting their cats instead — handheld. They could do so much more! Same goes for most of the people who actually bought camcorders that don’t use in their fullest.

Such a waste.