Nothing comes easy friend. I am taking a HUUUUGE leap of faith (literally) on this side business that will hopefully bloom into something more fruitful. When you have the full backing and support from a wonderful wife, it just makes things a little easier. (or maybe a lot easier, haha.)

+1

I got my new camera 2 weeks ago. It took me months of research, showing to my wife and "brain washing" her that I need this new camera. Hopefully I was able to put some money away from the tax return and also was assured by some of my customers (I do a lot of corporate gigs recently) that they will be very happy to pay a little more for HD quality. I felt sometimes that I was applying for a business loan - from my wife :-) But now it's here and I'm pulling all the strings to have that baby paid off in first 6 months after the investment. And my wife is happy to - she sees me working every evening on a videos.

Brad, I am pretty sure you made the right choice. I am thankful for DVI, I now look at wedding videos on an entirely different point of view. I have stagnate the last 5 years & after seeing work from all the guys here, I woke up & found a new "life".

:)
I know that feeling!
Its so easy to get caught up in the equipment side of the business, especially if you don't have kids, mortgage, college funds, car payments, family insurance premiums, IRA's etc. Its easy to think a piece of equipment will substantially improve what you can bring in, when what you do with the equipment is far more important.

That being said, the 5D MII is an exception. I just hope Canon will allow the tech to trickle into camera with manual controls that still accepts 35mm lenses.

Hey Noel,

Thanks for that congrats mate.

A lot of hard work comes before dropping $3K on a new camera. That plus substantial loans which is the case for me. Keep saving mate, nothing worse than paying off gear that is obselete.

Cheers,

Matthew.

Are more wedding videographers or photographers buying it? Are people buying it to be able to shoot photo *or* video or photo *and* video? It's fascinating to see how this might change the industry, though I wouldn't want to become a photographer.

I just got back from Los Angeles where we shot a narrative short for 3 full and one half day with the 5D. I got the 5DII from Precision Camera (was a Dvinfo sponsor it seems until recently) on Saturday and we started shooting on Monday.

We used a borrowed (all Canon) 24-105 f4, I bought a cheap 1.8 50mm and the director has a 17-40mm f4. We used the wide in bathrooms, the 24-105 for most stuff that was run-and-gun, and the 50mm for shallow depth of field. I'll be using Nikon lenses once I get back to Hawaii.

I got a 16G Extreme III and we borrowed an Extreme IV and the director said the offload times were similar. The Extreme III is 30MBps and not 30Mbps so it is more than fast enough. We shot about 2.5 hours of footage a day so we emptied a card between locations. I kept the two batteries charging (one was borrowed) as much as possible and we never ran out of juice.

What I can say is to mainly verify what has already been discussed. The audio is a pain due to lack of live monitoring but the image quality is so amazing that the camera is incredibly useful. We shot a huge amount of clips each day doing half a dozen takes of many shots. We were able to shoot in ways not before possible because of the low light performance and small form factor. The ability to pull a camera out of a small bag and walk onto a bus and shoot the main actor in a linking scene without irritating the driver or other passengers is priceless.

Slight correction, in that the ExtremeIIIs are 30 MB/s which is 240Mb/s while the camera records at a variable bitrate between 36 and 42 Mb/s. The data rate of the ExtremeIIIs is far more than sufficient for the video file, on paper. The only issue is that the camera reacts slightly differently to using a UDMA compatible card. When using an ExtremeIV UDMA card, there will be less video noise in the clips. This is especially apparent in the darker parts of the image. We have done extensive testing of this, and the issue has been confirmed by Canon, although they haven't explained WHY that is the case. Anyhow, the ExtremeIV cards come in UDMA and non-UDMA varients. The UDMA versions are much more expensive, but there is a difference.

the card speed is in megabytes/sec, the camera's data rate is in megaBITs/second - 38.6 megabits is equivalent to just under 5 megabytes - so the cards have plenty of headroom. Slower cards are actually fine in terms of the camera recording speed, but the faster transfer rates really make a difference when you're offloading from the card to your computer.

EDIT: just noticed Mark's reply above with the same info. The less noise thing is intriguing though as it would seem to be totally unrelated to card speed - the only logical explanation I can think of is that it's a temperature issue. It's feasible that the faster cards are more efficient and therefore run cooler especially since the camera isn't pushing them near their speed limits. Less heat from the card/circuitry may mean the sensor can run cooler (or shed heat more efficiently) and therefore generate less noise.