What a hectic time of the year! I’ve been a fan of DSLR video ever since we worked on the L&B music video. When I landed a big corporate video project a few weeks ago it took me about three seconds to decide that I wanted it shot with a Canon EOS 5D. To the uninitiated the 5D is a digital still camera that has become all the rage in the digital video world where a few pros are applying them with great effect to shoot everything from high end commercials to indie films.The footage is truly beautiful and the images we shot today were no exception.

 I’ve enlisted the help of camera genius and fellow tech geek Eduan Kitching to help me with this project. The workflow consisted of shooting all the video footage with Eduan’s 5D while I recorded the audio with my own Panasonic P2 camera. The 5D video and P2 audio will be synced up by hand with a reference video track from my camera and the recorded audio from Eduan’s camera (it sounds crazy but it should work out just fine because most of the audio is wild sound).

Filming with the 5D has some great pros and one or two cons. The pros are aesthetics and image quality - every frame filmed with the 5D benefits from the pristine optics on the front of the camera. Also, the lenses are interchangeble. The resulting H.264 QT files are also a breeze to work with and view on a laptop - we offloaded video files on location to my editing laptop, allowing ourselves and the ad agency to view the rushes as we worked.  The downside to shooting with the 5D is the fact that it is really a digital STILL camera – I kept wanting to ask Eduan to film zoom shots and then remembered that the camera has no zoom controller like an ordinary video camera. Also, shooting video this way requires a great deal of technical skill and is really more suited to situations where a lot of setup time is available. A large part of our day was spent shooting in a very rushed run ‘n gun fashion.