Thoughts after my first "real" shoot with the T2i.
 

After getting used to the camera for the last couple of weeks, I finally took it out on an actual client shoot yesterday.

I used it as my B cam against my Z7U and worked on the footage last night. All in all I'm very pleased with how it performed. Because I was running Bloom's recommended settings I had to crank up the sharpness in post and had to spend some time with the saturation and contrast to get it to match the Z7U.

But, it was worth the effort, the footage looks great. I can't wait for the client to see it.

One thing that did throw me a bit was right when the client came in and saw it he said, "That's a DSLR! What's it doing shooting video?" I told him it was the new technology and we're testing it out to see how it performs. It was an extra item, not covered in the deal so he was getting it for free.

But I was glad to have had all the other tons of gear I had there which made the shoot look professional. I can see there will be some pushback from clients if you try to convince them to shoot the entire thing with a DSLR, until they see the results of course.

Unfortunately the subject material is private otherwise I'd post some examples from the shoot, but the bottom line is that it worked very well and I'm excited to continue to use it on projects.

Z5 & 7d
 

I'm using a similar setup

Z5 is A-Cam, 7D is B-Cam.

I've only used it on 2 weddings at the weekend, so not editied yet (transcoding the footage as I type this)

From what I've seen so far, the 2 cams match pretty well in terms of low light.

iso 1600, shutter 50 and f 2.8 on the 7D seems to match up with the Z5 wide open and 6db gain.

Colours on the 7d were richer, even in the neutral settings and tweeken bloom settings.

My B-cam to my Z5 used to be an fx7, and after only 2 days of shooting with the 7D, I can say that in my opinion, the 7D out does the FX7 no contest (appart from the audio, recording limit etc)

I'm liking the 7D so much, I'll prob get a 550d / t2i to use as a C-Cam (so it would kinda replace my HC-1)

Keep posing your thoughts on mixing / matching the z7 / t2i. I'll do the same with my z5 7d.

Cheers

James

You like it better if you have a F1.4 lens, F 2.8 is just barely making it for weddings.

It's size is a double edged sword - great to move and run and gun - bad for impressing people.

Which is why I'm tricking the thing out with as many ad-on gizmos as humanly possible - it needs to pass the "Keifer" test.

john

i can second that.

I've got the 50mm f1.4 , low light capability as excellent, just need to really pay attention to the focus

James,

What project settings are you using in CS3 and what are you using to convert footage?

Peter

Further thoughts:

The angle I shot the T2i with I also used my Z7U for one of the segments. So I've got the same shot on both cameras to compare to. I didn't have this Z7U footage captured when I made my initial post.

What I've discovered is I do not like the amount of sharpness I have to increase on my T2i footage to get it as sharp (or even close to as sharp) as the Z7U footage. On its own the T2i footage looks great but when side by side with the Z7U is very obvious how soft it is.

Note: This is entirely because I had sharpness cranked all the way down on the T2i, focus was spot on.

So my thought now is that when I'm shooting with the T2i to match a sharp video camera I probably need to put sharpness back up to center. If I'm shooting something with the T2i on its own then I would use the softer settings.

Will need to do some testing to see how it compares when sharpness is turned back up, but those are my thoughts thus far.

Is it possible to show some examples, Bryan?

How soft is soft? The examples I've seen, the 7D/550D is pretty sharp... although it's said that real film is also softer compared to video. Or... why homevideo looks like homevideo, and real film like Hollywood.

Unfortunately I cannot post examples from this shoot, but if/when I do some testing I will.

Yes, the T2i CAN be quite sharp, but I when I shot with it the other day I was using Bloom's settings and had the sharpness cranked all the way down. Which is intended to generate a more film like appearance, and it does, but I didn't consider how different it would be when matching to straight video.

Some of those settings with sharpness all they way down and flat is for you to grade and add sharpness back in post, my feeling is too shoot as close as possible to the way you want since in camera 14bit processing is better than post NLE 8bit processing but that is just me, I'm sure other will dissagree but either way, the DSLR video at the moment will not be as sharp in detail resolving as HD camera like your Z7 or XH-A1, EX1, but if you are shooting weddings with low/available light and if you have F1.4 lens it will be so much better because it has less noise, brighter and of course shalow dof that no 1/3 chip camera can do.

I tried to measure the resolution of my T2i, but aliasing made it all but impossible. I estimate the resolution to be about 700TVL which is closer to what you would get with a 720P camera than a 1080 camera.

Just did a very quick test and it seems clear to me that to match my Z7U sharpness needs to be dialed all the way up to 7. Even then it's not *quite* there.

What would the difference be, doing it on the camera or doing it in post?

Yike, you don't want to do that, the camera just don't have the details, so don't try to make it something it is not, adding sharpness is just an edge contrast enhancement, you will see serious halo artifacts around the edge at that level.

If its done on the camera there is no "undo" right, that's why I was wondering why not just save it for post, or is it just to decrease processing time by using the camera function?