Yesterday I had lunch with Doctor Popular and after we ate I asked him if he could do some of his amazing Yo-Yo tricks so I could test out my new Canon 5D Mark II DSLR. I was especially interested to see how the 1080p HD video looked on this amazing full-frame camera. I uploaded the video to Vimeo’s new Plus service which allows unlimited HD video uploading as well as HD video embedding.
Of course as a still camera, it’s quite an upgrade over my previous 5D. Here are a few photos of Doc Pop doing Yo-Yo tricks and posing with his Peugeot.
The low light sensitivity of this camera has greatly improved since the original 5D. Here’s a photo of Adam Jackson at Monday’s Web 2.0 Holiday Bailout Party that he organized at Harlot in San Francisco. The club was very dark, so I shot it at ISO 6400 to see how it would come out and I was pleasantly surprised to say the least.
I’m still getting use to all of the new features, but so far this camera rocks!
See Previously: Canon 5D Mark II 21.1 Megapixel DSLR Camera With 1080 HD Video
UPDATE 1: Tyler Ginter has posted a great video explaining “How To Use Video Mode on the Canon 5D MK II” :
UPDATE 2: PopPhoto recently reviewed the 5DMKII.
photos by Scott Beale
Here Are A Few Related Posts You Might Enjoy:
- Doctor Popular Creates The World’s Most Collectible Sandwich
- Canon 5D Mark II 21.1 Megapixel DSLR Camera With 1080 HD Video
- Tokyo Reality, An Unofficial Canon 5D Mark II HD Demo Video
- Canon 5D Mark II HD Video of Nine Inch Nails In Live Concert
- Magic Lantern Firmware Enhances The Video Features of The Canon 5D Mark II
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Doctor Popular is excellent with the yoyo. Nice video quality from the Canon 5Dm2, also.
Amazing, don’t think the side of my brain that would allow me to do a trick like that functions now or ever. Wow.
Dang. Doc Pop freaking rocks. Thanks for the link Scott. I’m really glad you came to Monday’s Party
That’s a lot of praise for a body! You know it’s all in the lens dontcha?
Actually that’s not true. It’s not all in the lens. The two examples posted here (HD video & ISO 6400) are only possible upgrading to the 5D Mark II body.
I’m always amazed how many people don’t actually read the blog post they are commenting on.
Beaut. I’m pretty geeked for my own body to show up.
Looking forward to lots more stills and video.
Always interesting to hear other people’s thoughts on the MkII.
Had mine for a fortnight now and am finding it great – and a significant jump from my 20D I’ve been using for 3.5yrs. The high ISO performance is just amazing when compared with the 20D!
awesome video :)
as a video camera i’m running into some interesting technical limitations. some which will make this an awesome bit of kit for shooting certain kinds of projects, and frustrating for others:
- No manual aperture control :( I’ve been told ND filters will work around this when shooting outside, but have yet to try it.
- Low bit depth. (Data rate suggest 4:2:0) If you don’t shoot it right the first time, you’ll have a really hard time pushing or pulling the shot before you start clipping. I think this is normal for video cameras though…
- Sound input blows, but you can drive a -10dBu signal off a dedicated recorder and resync later.
- Auto focus is worthless when shooting during recording.
- HDMI out toggles during record.
- 30p :/
but yeah, it’s like complaining your gold plated ferrari handles poorly when you switch it into speed boat mode and cruise out into the Venetian canals. the camera produces beautiful video and takes amazing photos :)
Shoot me an email Scott and I’ll get you a Premium account on Viddyou so we can see what 1080 HD looks like… (also we run a higher bitrate on 720p and support more native resolutions)
We all know that the yoyo tricks were all photo magic from you camera, he’s totally green screened – I would know, i’m an editor, I have a camera, and I own a Yo-Yo.
I’ve always been skeptical about Vimeo’s HD feature, and I feel that this video proves that it’s not, in fact, true 1080p HD. If the source video that was uploaded was true 1080p, or 1920×1080, then the Vimeo player would not show any pixelation when set to full screen. This video does show pixelation on my 24″ screen which is 1920×1200.
If you turn off scaling at full screen (the bottom button in the upper left of the player), the video playback shrinks down to what appears to be 720p, or 1280×720. The artifacts disappear but the video shows significant artifacting which implies a lower bitrate.
Of course, this video has a lot of fast motion, so the bitrate required to make it really nice and smooth might be too high for progressive download with playback on most Internet connections.
OK I’m done now.
very cool to see nice camera’s capabilities. I have a lot of fun with my brand new- simple novice for fun eye, point+shoot cannon sd990.
I love these shots, special with the blue bike, bridge and sweet boy /excellent combo ;)
Last Wednesday I used my two 5D MkII’s in a 3 camera music video shoot. The third camera was a Sony PMW-EX1. Audio was recorded on two additional devices. One audio recording device was an Edirol R4 Pro. The other audio recording setup was a Tascam USB Interface to a MacBook Pro.
The Sony Camera, Edirol, and Tascam/MacBook Pro devices all synced sound perfectly over the full duration of the shoot (just over 20 minutes). To clarify – once the different sources are sync’d quickly and easily to the slate clap on the waveform at the beginning of the shoot they all stayed perfectly in sync for the rest of the video.
Both Canon cameras audio and video sync’d perfectly to each other but drifted significantly from the other 3 devices even over a 3 minute segment. The is a very serious problem for me and one that introduces significant post-production trouble and expense.
This issue was so unexpected (I haven’t run into this in years of working with a range of equipment) that I performed 3 subsequent tests to confirm that the 5D MkII’s run too fast. The results from the test show both of my 5D Mark II run about 14 frames too fast in 10 minutes. Audio that is 1 full frame out of sync is noticeable on sharp sounds causing an echo. Audio that is 2 or 3 frames out of sync causes echo on any sound and looks odd in terms of lip sync.
That the two Canon cameras audio sync’d OK to each other tells me that the cameras can be calibrated to a standard. Evidently they are just calibrated to an incorrect standard.
Anybody else experience this? Does anybody really know if this is likely a chip issue or a firmware issue? Does anyone know an easy reliable way to get the clips to conform to the standard without time-consuming constant tweaking?
I contacted Canon tech support and the girl there couldn’t care less – she said there was no fix and that it wasn’t really a video camera so what did I expect? Nice!