Kevin Warnock

I was looking at videos tagged with 5DM2 on Vimeo today. Vimeo hosts the videos on this blog, and can be thought of as a high end YouTube without ads. 5DM2 is short for Canon 5D Mark II, the digital still camera that shoots outstanding video as well. It’s the camera I use for the stills and video on this blog.

I came across a thought provoking video tonight that shows a Canon 7D matched up with Panavision lenses. Panavision lenses are for Hollywood style movie cameras. Panavision rents rather than sells their cameras, and the lenses can’t be rented without a camera, so it’s unclear how likely it will be for anyone to actually use a Panavision lens with a Canon camera. Also, if one were able to buy a Panavision lens, I suspect they would cost as much as a new car each.

The Canon 7D shoots at a lower resolution than my camera, but it shoots at 24P, while my camera only shoots at the video rate of 30P. Serious film fans mostly prefer 24P, which is the rate film motion picture cameras shoot at. The video from the 7D thus looks more film like than video from the 5D Mark II. I prefer the later, as I also shoot stills, and the 5D Mark II shoots at 21 megapixels and has a full frame sensor, while the 7D has a cropped sensor with a lower number of pixels.

This 7D/Panavision experiment was conducted by Zacuto USA, which rents and sells professional motion picture equipment.

Here is a simply outstanding clip of the results that were obtained with the 7D/Panavision rig. This clip has all the quality of a major Hollywood blockbuster from what I can see on my laptop. The low light capability of the Canon DSLRs are amazing.