Camera Test - 5D Mk3 Raw

I have just completed my first experiment with the 5D Mk3 + Magic Lantern RAW + Transcend 64 GB 1000x + Davinci Resolve 10 Lite...



Firstly, I'm pretty stoked about the huge improvement in image quality, not in the least because it was free. To put things in perspective this firmware has allowed 5D users to do things that only very expensive cameras do, such as the Canon 1D-C, Red Epic, Arri Alexa - that is, shoot/record in RAW. Black Magic continue to challenge the big brands with their competitively priced camera range, but they utilize a much smaller sensor than that of the 5D. The ML firmware has certainly super-charged these little units meaning the 5D (mk3) once again punches well above it's weight.

Check a single frame of raw footage and a 100% crop of that same image...

Clarity and Sharpness remain since by-passing the compression of the standard H.264 codec.

NZ is famous for the harshness of our sun and filming in the middle of the day it's hard to avoid extreme contrasts in light. Frequently skies blow out or shadows lose all detail. The image below was also taken from the RAW footage. I exposed for the highlights thus crushing the blacks. When 'developing' the raw file I was pleasantly surprised to find plenty detail retrievable in the shadows.

Workflow. Here comes the negative of working in RAW. The Raw files are many times larger than consumer codecs such as H.264 so you need bigger cards, greater storage and faster chips to deal with them. Larger file sizes takes us back to the days of offline/online editing when the computers weren't fast enough to handle the full resolution images. I'm sure raw movie files won't be an issue for pc's of the future but for now at least the process must be broken down into a number of steps. For this test I did the following:
    1. Renamed files using Actions app.
    2. converted RAW files to DNG's using RAW2CDNG app.
    3. Imported files into Davinci Resolve.
    4. Exported files as MXF files and an AAF to Avid MC.
    5. Edited movie in Avid.
    6. Exported AAF from Avid to Resolve.
    7. Graded footage. in Resolve
    8. Exported AAF to Avid.
    9. Exported final movie.
I am still ironing out the wrinkles in my workflow. i.e. problems round-tripping AAF's to and from Avid and Resolve. The annoying teething problems will disappear once a solid workflow is established. 

Davinci Resolve. Resolve is quite different in its layout to other programs I've worked with so it took me a while to get my head around it. Upgrading from version 9 to 10 also set me back a bit. BTW You have to upgrade to version 10 to be able to work in the BMFilm color space. I have only scratched the surface with this software and look forward to learning all the quick keys etc to get some good flow going.

Magic Lantern Firmware. To be honest I haven't fully investigated the functionality of this firmware except for the RAW aspect but overall it has been very stable without freezing once. I like how the firmware sits on the SD card and isn't permanently installed on the camera. The RAW module needs to be activated each time the camera restarts so set your automatic shut down to 5 or 8 minutes. I forgot to activate the RAW a few times and just shot H.264 and had no idea until afterwards. Playback of recorded RAW files is limited to the last file recorded. There was no message to say the card was full it just keep trying to record again but would stop and say skipped frame at...

Transcend 64GB 1000x. These cards are awesome. I had no problems at all and they performed as they should. Being in NZ Komputerbay was not an option so these were the next best thing and probably better.

Lenses.  I used two main lenses for this test - canon 50mm f1.4, canon 135mm f2.0 L. Your lens choices are going to influence the look of your movie no matter what camera of what format you shoot in. The last lens I bought was the Canon 24-105mm f4 L which was sufficient when I was shooting H.624. The heavily compressed images were not inspiring me to invest in better glass. Now that I can see real clarity and greater detail I am once again seriously contemplating that perfect prime lens.

ND Filters. One thing I disregarded completely for this test was the shutter speed. Although I have ND filters I wanted to keep the test as simple as possible. As a result the shutter speed often rose towards the upper limit of 4000 meaning movement looked less filmic and more hip hop music video. For any serious work I would probably go for a matte box and some quality ND's.

Working with 5D's and Premiere Pro in practical terms

I have just completed the first 6 episodes of a documentary series to be broadcast on Maori Television later this year. This series was shot entirely on 5D's. It was also my first time editing with Premiere Pro. Here are a few observations.

Production
Though my primary role on the series was that of editor I was also called upon to camera operate on the odd occasion. Our shoots were fairly basic - mainly talking heads plus various GVs. We were required to travel to various locations around the north island. Our relatively compact kit included: 2 Canon 5D's, 3 Zeiss Prime Lenses, tripod dolly, lighting kit, Zoom H2N, shotgun & radio mics.

Over two months of shooting this kit was put through its paces. The kit was light and compact. During the 20+ interviews the 5D's performed without a hitch. The only annoyance being the 11 min record time limit and having to change batteries regularly. 16G CF cards gave us 40+ minutes so 32G cards were plenty for the average I/V. At times changing lenses got a bit laborious but the images produced by the Zeiss 100mm in particular were very pleasing. We did miss the slo-mo capabilities of the 7D and also the HD signal to our 6" HDMI monitor. Recording audio on the Zoom was pretty painless, however, we did come across a fault when the battery of the Zoom died mid-interview and the data was lost. we only discovered the data-less file a number of weeks later by which time it was too late to recover. A known issue and costly technical error as the interview had to be re-done.

Post Production
After Final Cut went bonkers with FCPX I decided to give Premiere (CS5.5) a shot. I also decided to go with a PC running Windows 7 64bit. Having spent most of my time using Apple Macs I hit a steep learning curb switching to a PC. Lacking  in knowledge and experience I decided to get a ready-made desktop Dell XPS 8300 opting for the highest specs available - i7 chip, nvidea GTX 570, 8GB ram (upgraded to 12GB), USB 3.0 ready, Blue-ray Burner, Dual 23" UltraSharp Monitors. For storage I purchased two WD Mybook 3TB USB 3.0 drives (one for back up). This was soon insufficient space for the new and archival material so I acquired another 3 TB of storage.

Premiere CS5 introduces a sequence preset for DSLR material which allows native editing of 5D and other DSLR footage. The smoothness of playback depends on the speed of your computer. On my PC the footage played back pretty well but wasn't completely smooth at full res (you can reduce the playback resolution in settings). The nvidea GTX 570 isn't listed as supported by the GPU acceleration but a quick google search lead me to a link that showed me how to make the simple modifications to allow it to work.

One fatal flaw I encountered with the GPU acceleration is that it doesn't like working with still images. While manipulating still images in a sequence premiere would inevitably crash after a number of minutes. After googling the problem it seems it is a known issue that has been around since CS4 and has not been resolved to date. The best way around it is to turn off GPU acceleration while working on stills and turn it back on when rendering or exporting.

Other than that, Premiere ran pretty well considering the size of my project ballooned as I created five 26 minute episodes in the one project (the project takes a minute to re-link the 6000+ files upon opening). I particularly enjoyed the dynamic link between Premiere and After Effects. I was less sure about dynamic linking from Premiere to Encore and opted rather to export using the DVD or Blue Ray presets.

The only other programs purchased were Plural Eyes and Mc Drive.  The former was an absolute essential and massive time-saver in syncing up the 5D footage. The latter was also very important in moving between platforms without issue.

A second major issue arose when exporting an OMF for sound mix. Where  I had a stereo signal split into two single mono tracks the OMF only exported one of them. This occurs when those tracks are also located in another sequence as a stereo track. I'm not sure of the exact details but after many failed attempts to work around the issue I resorted to rendering and replacing the affected tracks and then exporting them separately. The problem with this is that you don't get the usual option of adding handles to each clips. This is also a known issue that Adobe will have to address pretty quickly if they want their product to complete with the other NLE's.

Once sound-mix was complete I exported the shows as Quicktime movies using H.264 compression. Each episode took about 45 minutes to export and were about 10-12GB in size.

Overall we were pretty pleased with the results. For this kind of filming we were able to work around the limitations of the 5D and managed to get some stunning imagery from this inexpensive little kit. Though far from perfect, in a professional setting both the 5D and Premiere Production Suite 5.5 get a steady tick and a bang for buck rating of 8/10.

5D video work flow

I recently shot a friend's wedding on my 5D. It has been a valuable exercise in terms of establishing a good workflow when using this camera.

It was a Chinese wedding meaning it was long and it was frantic! In the end 2.5 hours of rushes in HD1080p totaling almost 52GB of data.

The 5D records quicktime movies using H.264/MPEG-4 compression at 38 Megabits per second. You can work with these file directly in Final Cut Pro but playback is jerky and soon becomes infuriating. By the way I am using a Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB Ram.

The most common solution is to convert the files into Apple ProRes 422 using compressor which comes with Final Cut Studio. Thus maintaining HD resolution and working well in FCP. The only drawback is the ProRes files are about 3 times larger than the H.264 files. So you will need a decent amount of space to store them.

Once edited I now wanted to create a DVD for my friends. Having shot in HD naturally I wanted to give my friends the best quality video possible. At the moment you have the option of burning HD video to a Blue-ray disc or down-converting to SD video and burning a standard 4.7 DVD.

Since I don't own a Blue-ray burner nor do I think my friends own a Blue-ray player I have decided to down-convert to an SD DVD. I will also give them a copy of the HD video file to view on their PC.

I also came across this interesting post by Ken Stone about a possible alternative.

In Compressor i used the first DVD settings preset dragging the whole folder up and applying to my clip.

I created a simple DVD menu in DVD Studio Pro and changed the settings to SD 16:9. This needs to be done in the preferences and on each menu under display mode.

Again refer to Ken Stone's Setting up DVD Studio for 16:9.

Now I am in the final stages of creating my DVD. I will post an update once I have finished.