I use semi or pro cameras these days, but I’ll always be a proponent of “you can do the same with less”. A number of people have emailed in the past year asking me which HD video-capable P&S digicam they should buy. I reply to them suggesting either the Canon SD780 IS or the SX200 IS, depending on their budget. Only to come back to me, within 24 hours, and say “but, but… what about this Panasonic model?”. Honestly, that’s pretty annoying. So I decided to write this blog post to explain why *for video*, a Canon HD digicam is better than any other in the sub-$300 range.

Image quality
Panasonic uses better lenses in most of their HD sub-$300 models, and worse in few others. However, Canon uses 24 mbps bitrate, while Panasonic uses 17 mbps (the format internally is essentially the same, AVCHD-Lite or not). Winner: Canon for footage with more movement, with possibly Panasonic being the winner for static scenes. So it’s a bit of draw here, it highly depends on the model in question.

Low light
Panasonic wins. While the sensor size is the same in the modern crop of P&S cams, Canon has been quite bad in low light lately. That Digic4 chip wasn’t all that it was hyped out to be.

Zoom while recording
Only one model from Canon, the SX210 IS, supports optical zooming while recording. However, as I have explained in the past many times, if you’re doing artistic and not random family videos, then you should not be zooming while recording. It’s a home-video tell-tale sign. Anyways, this goes to Panasonic.

Color Controls
Canon wins hands down. They offer sharpness, contrast, saturation, skin color, and even individual R, G, B manipulation, which can help you get the film look right out of the box! Shooting “flat” also has extreme value when color grading. Panasonic’s color controls pale in comparison. And even their most “flat” mode is not flat enough. It’s high-jacked on saturation and contrast like a 50-year old hooker.

Exposure and lock
Both Panny and Canon have exposure compensation support, but Canon goes one step beyond, by letting you lock exposure. Without locking, your video will look like amateur home video. It’s the No1 feature I personally look into a camera. Without this feature, there’s no sale for me. Even if you give me such a camera for free I wouldn’t touch it.

Manual Focus and lock
Some Canon cams, like the SX200/SX210 IS, have the ability to precisely control the focus (rather than just “macro”, “normal”, “infinity”). For these cams, Canon wins, for the rest, it’s a draw I guess.

Now, if you count the wins and the draws, the two manufacturers almost even out. However, except the zooming while recording (which is a feature that as a filmmaker I couldn’t care less about), Panasonic didn’t win anything with a big lead. Canon on the other hand gets ahead with its color controls and exposure locking (which as I explained is the No1 feature for me). So for the kinds of videos I shoot, and the kinds of videos I encourage people to shoot, Canon has a clear advantage, even if they don’t do everything right. It’s all about what kinds of videos you shoot, so different features have different weight. And I can only speak for the kinds of videos I do.

Now, if you just want to shoot the cat tormenting your dog, or your grandmother putting her teeth back, then a $70 Kodak Zi6 will do the job too. No reason to spend more in that case.

The next step for both manufacturers would be to offer selectable 23.976, 25.00, and 29.97 fps. Full manual control is almost impossible in video mode in these digicams (various hardware constraints), but frame rate selection is not. An adapter hook for a filter thread wouldn’t be a bad idea either, so this way we could somewhat control the outdoors high shutter speeds by using ND filters.

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.

FCC Disclaimer: The above are my very own personal & truthful opinions. Not paid or endorsed by Canon.

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.