Combining Sony EX1 25p and Canon 5D/7D footage

Hi, I'm on a short-film project. As I live in a PAL country I'm using 1920 x 1080 and a 25p frame rate. I considered it would provide me with a less tricky 24p conversion and a natural conversion to 50i for TV. There are no lipsync problems as there are no dialogues, and the sound is being recorded in a TASCAM digital recorder.

I've been reading a lot about the new Canon 5D mark II and Canon 7D video features and I really wanted to give them a try for two specific situations:
- Outdoors night situations without complicated light arrangements, this would be tripod shots and some steadycam shots.
- Recording "guerrilla way" inside buses and trains.

My questions are:

- The natural choice would be going for the 7D as it allows 25p. But as I might get better high ISO shots I was wondering if it would be a problem to go for the 5D and then downconverting to 25p (and eventually to 24p).

- As short-film awards in my country generally offer 35mm film transfer as 1st and 2nd price, ¿will Canon footage show OK on the big screen? (¿at least on a 2K digital projection?) As for the EX1, I'd heard that it will get a decent passage to film (or at least It'll do better than DVCAM footage).

Thanks in advance

Marcelo

I think you need to research this much more thoroughly.

7D and 5DmkII footage is a hot topic, but very complex - lots of issues, and plenty of discussion on other forums - try www.cinema5d.com for example, and Phil Bloom's blog, and dvxuser.

in terms of how it would look blown up, it depends what your aspirations are. if you're aiming to deliver top class imagery this is probably not the way to go unless you can deal with the following

1) the canon cameras don't *really* deliver 1920 x 1080 ... more like 720p in real detail
2) both 7d and 5d show significant aliasing and moire issues which would be pretty horrible blown up (so you'd need to plan how to avoid this on your shoot)
3) they're difficult to work with - no zebras, ergonomics all wrong, you probably need extra gear for monitoring and support etc.
4) shooting at night in low light you'll end up needing to have your lenses wide open - which will make focusing very difficult, especially assuming you'd use stills lenses. to give an example, if you've got a 50mm at 1.4, your depth of field is a small number of centimetres - it would be pretty tough if not impossible to work this on a steadycam for example. again you'd need to plan how to make this work on your shoot.

comparing the 5dmkII and the 7d - 5d has approx 1 stop better performance so you'd either get less noise for the same settings, or 1 stop down on your lens (for a bit more DOF and probably sharper) at the same noise level. but then you've got the frabbing to convert the frame rate. also the crop factor is different - so either your 50mm full frame lens becomes approx an 85mm on the 7d, or conversely your 50mm on the 7d may vignette horribly on the 5dmkII.

Broadly I think that if you shoot it well, a shot from either of these cameras will blow up well enough to look good. The hard part is that your film will require LOTS of shots. These cameras are not straighforward to shoot with - you may end up with a couple of great shots, with the rest out of focus, badly exposed or messed by the codec.

best of luck

	storitel wrote:
	I think you need to research this much more thoroughly. 7D and 5DmkII footage is a hot topic, but very complex - lots of issues, and plenty of discussion on other forums - try www.cinema5d.com for example, and Phil Bloom's blog, and dvxuser.

Excelent remarks Storitel, guess I'll have to reconsider using the EX1 for those shots.

I too became confused after reading your questions. Using 1920 x 1080 and a 25p frame rate is really a good idea as it can be easily converted in to 24p. In my opinion using a 5D Mark II instead of 7D is better because as far as I know 5D get better high ISO shots. But the problem is with the conversion. If you hire some technical experts from a Company , I think conversion won’t be a problem for you as they can convert it to the required frame rate. Many of my friends used Canon cameras for short film making and so I think Canon footage will show OK on the big screen.