An Idiots Guide To Shooting With Your 7D/550D

I made a quick idiot-guide to shooting settings to put in the camera bag so I could quickly dial in the right settings nice and fast (I have a terrible memory, I’ve been meaning to write this post for a week!). So I thought I’d share it with you. If I had design skills I’d make it into little card for you to download, but I don’t so you’ll have to deal with the making pretty stuff yourself.

Picture Style Settings For SuperFlat

Sharpness: 0

Contrast: -4

Saturation: -2

Colour tone: 0

Highlight Tone Priority: ON

ISO

160, 320, 640, 1250

FPS – Shutter Speed

24/25 – 1/50

50 – 1/100

50 to be slowed by half to 25 – 1/200

REMEMBER TO WHITE BALANCE!!

A comparison of shutter speeds and techniques for slo-mo footage

Back in this article I rasied the question of which shutter speed would be best if you intended to turn your 720@50fps footage into slo-mo. I wasn’t 100% sure, and there was some debate in the comments about which techniques produced the best results so I thought I’d do a little test.

I shot the same exciting footage of pouring a glass of water on a 7D set to 720@50fps using 1/100, 1/200 and 1/400. I then converted it to ProRez422HQ and conformed the 1/200 and 1/400 from 50fps to 25fps in CinemaTools. I then stuck it all into FCP7 into two timelines, one 50fps and one 25fps. As there wasn’t a conform to 12.5fs option in CinemaTools to quarter the 1/400 I took the halved 1/400 footage and slowed the speed by half using FCP’s speed tool, leaving blend/scale/ripple all on.  Below are the two results exported as 720 H.264 25fps and 50fps.

50fps timeline

25fps timeline

I having looked at the clips a number of times, zoomed in on the detail, gone through them frame by frame I prefer the 1/200 slowed by CinemaTools to 25fps in the 25fps timeline. If you were going for a really slow shot I’d defiantly suggest the 1/400/CinemaTools/FCPspeed option as although a little soft, its still very much usable.

But that’s my opinion, and as with all these things its down to personal taste. So which do you prefer? Comments are just below. And if you’d like me to re-do the test in anyway just shout and I’ll see what I can do.

Reducing Noise on Canon Cameras

If you’re the owner of a 7D or 550D you have experienced some issues with Noise on your recordings thanks to the rather over zealous work of the AGC -Auto Gain Control, if you’re not familiar with this concept, its something that is designed to assist the camera in picking out sound when the volume going into the device decreases. On the 5D mark II and 1D there are hacked firmwares by Magic Lantern which can allow you to disable this feature of those models, but as of the time of writing, no such firmware hack is available to 7D / 550D owners.

This is where a hack comes in! Thanks to Mike B, aka Fony on youtube, you can effect a solution with the use of a simply Y connector (stereo to 2 mono) and a cheap mp3 player. Mike’s technique involves creating a false noise floor, which forces the AGC to hold back from turning up the mic, well enough yap from me, check out his solution in the video below -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91xw_NX0Qm8

Some folks in the youtube comments have stated that they have had issues with this solution for the 550D, haven’t had chance to try it just yet but look forward to finding out if anyone has luck with it!

Picture Styles & Grading

Came across these excellent videos from Adam Stevenson on Vimeo.com. I represent them here with his permission, cheers Adam!

Here you’ll learn some useful other potential picture styles, and in the comments you can find links to picture styles you can upload to your camera using EOS Utility (Canon only, sorry!). Just plug your camera in, set it to manual camera mode and then click ‘Register User Defined Style’ then upload the files Adam offers to your User Defined 1, 2 or 3.

Adam also shows in his video use of Magic Bullet Looks, an awesome suite of grading tools from Red Giant Software.

Canon 550D / T2i Picture Style Colour Settings

A quick video tutorial on how to set up User Defined Picture Style for video on the Canon 550D / T2i

A little something about Picture Styles

Rather than recording all the data captured by the sensor like cameras like the RED (a format loosely known as RAW) most DSLR’s when shooting video save data via a filter algorithm (known as a codec), in Canon’s case the widely used H.264 or MPEG-4.

It’s a simple flow of information from sensor through filter to card. This filter algorithm works out what information isn’t needed to be remembered for the video to still look okay. Its much like the way music is stripped of frequencies not audible to the human ear by the MP3 codec. It’s a simple case of space-saving for the card and buffer.

Now in most Canon cameras the filter algorithm is called the ‘picture style’. These are pre-set filters made by Canon, aiming to record the right information to make your video look its best, given you match what you’re shooting with what the picture style is called. So for example, if you’re shooting a landscape Canon think their ‘Landscape’ picture style would save the right mix of pixels to the card to make your video look just right.

Now these might be fine when you’re shooting photos in JPEG (they were originally designed to process photos not shot in RAW), but if you’re shooting video you’ll want to have control over what is saved to the card. Why? Well to properly colour correct your footage and get its looking its best you’ll need the right mix of properly exposed pixels to work with. So its really nice to know that Canon let you design and install on the camera some of your own picture styles. These can be designed in detail in the EOS utility and uploaded to the camera or quickly made in-camera by changing the Sharpness, Contrast, Colour Saturation and Colour Tone. You’ll also want to look at the White Balance Shift to take out any colour casts your lens or sensor may be making.

Now I know what you’re thinking, ‘Nick, what’s the best picture style for video?’ and the answer is it all depends on what you’re shooting, where you’re shooting and what you need to get out of the pictures. General consensus is that flatter and closer to a RAW photo the profile is, the more information is stored and can therefore be played with in post production. If you don’t want to put the time in messing with it in post you can always use a picture style that emulates your favourite film stock or effect. There’s loads of user defined styles out on the Internets so have a Google, load them up onto your camera and see what you like.

Personally I’d rather get a nice flat images so the camera records as much detail as possible in what will eventually be the highlights and shadows. This gives me more latitude to play with things in post and see where I want my image to sit in the grand scheme of detail and exposure. It’ll also give any colour correcting effects the maximum opportunity to keep detail in the picture.

www.MobyGratis.com

One of the most overlooked parts of post production is the audio.

Fact.

Fail to include incidental music and spot effects and your masterpiece is nothing but a shell of pretty pictures and (sometimes) shaky dialogue.

And thats where www.MobyGratis.com comes in to help. Its a free-to-register site that lets independent, non-profit film-makers and students download and use music from Moby in their projects. If you need to get a commercial licence then there’s a simple form to sort that out too.

MPEG Streamclip

Anyone making any kind of digital video will probably find this useful – MPEG Streamclip is a converting and transcoding tool which will let you work accross almost any video & audio format.

Already aware of VLC media player? This is the VLC of the conversion world. Even better, its totally free for both PC and Mac! Bravo to Squared5 the developers, big thanks for your work on this!

We have found through various tests that it is often better to take the native footage that comes from cameras such as Canon’s 7D and 550D and convert it from H.264 to a  less render intensive format such as XDCAM – this will allow you add certain effects in Final Cut Pro with minimal and in some cases no rendering time.