Where do you start for videos?

[TC1006]

Hello, So i just received my 5D3 and haven't yet played with the video feature yet. I've seen some amazing videos out the 5D2 and 5D3's. So questions for a beginner like myself:

Where do you start? I know the movies use the 24fps
What Lens to use? I own the 50 1.4, 135L f.2, 24-105L
What about the Aperture and Shutter speed values?
What Mode? Manual, Av, TV
Focusing tips/techniques?

Please point me in the right direction.

Thank  You!

[HenrikBC]

Congrats on your new cam.

Begin with this (menus will look different on mk III) but the same settings are good for video use:

Philip Bloom setting up a Canon 5D Mark II for video	Small | Large

This may also be of interest:
https://vimeo.com/39292404

[Knut Skywalker]

Hey!
I have a 5D2 and I'm starting out with Video also! I found this REALLY amazing show on Youtube and Revision3 which is called FilmRiot and I tell you what...These guys are freaking amazing! Every monday, they now have a so called MondayChallenge, where they give you...well, a challenge and you have to film and edit it. The best ones get picked and are featured on the show! It really helps you to get your *** up and shoot! I'ts just amazing, helped me a lot! They have over 100 episodes with turorials and how-to's on how to get started as a filmmaker. Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/user/filmriot

Greetings from Germany!

[psyrex]

Congrats, videos are very fun!

Before you get into all the settings and such, you first kind of have to figure out what you're shooting and what you plan to do with the footage you captured.

For example, if you're aiming for something more cinematic looking, you'll probably want to go for 24p and a 1/50 shutter to get that movie look. However, if in the middle of your video you have your character do something like watch a home movie, then you probably want to shoot that 'home movie' with a faster shutter speed to emulate the choppy look of a cheap camcorder. What you want your footage to look like is what determines your settings.

As to HenrikBC's link to the picture style, that one is hard for me to recommend. I certainly do shoot flat, but I also spend tons of time in post. The purpose of a flat picture style is to not "bake" certain camera settings into the footage to get it as neutral as possible. This assumes that you'll spend time to add back in the contrast, saturation, etc. If you won't be doing post production, then the flat style probably won't suit you since the saturation will be gone.

It's like people who shoot in raw, but never do anything with it, just convert to JPG and upload. At that point, just shoot in JPG and get your sharpening, saturation, and contrast in camera and be done with it.

As for tips for focusing: seriously, the only tip is to practice. There is no holy grail for focusing tips. You can study all the great shots and try to emulate their look, but if you don't practice, you'll be focus hunting worse than a contrast detection autofocus in a cave.

For example, I just finished a wedding on Saturday thinking I did alright given the lighting and organizational constraints (as in, no organization. They were all over the place doing things last minute and I scrambled around trying to capture everything). I was reviewing the footage on Monday and I lost some nice shots because of focus. There's this one where I had the bride's back in frame and thought I had the focus on her reflection as she checked out her makeup. All I had in focus? Not the bride's back, not her reflection, but just the freaking mirror! Major fail. I need to focus on focusing.

Anyways, tangent aside, just go out, shoot, edit, have fun. It's the best way to learn.

[Policar]

Neutral really is the best setting (unless you're shooting b camera and your a camera is in log mode in which case you can use cinegamma, but that's a rare situation to be in so don't sweat it!) because of the lack of sharpening (which is poorly implemented) and the color balance is best in neutral; faithful has a bad tint and the rest are all exaggerated and unnatural.  The amount of contrast and saturation are your call based on what look you want.  I keep sharpening at zero but the footage is very soft with this setting; it's still preferable to the halos you get with sharpening, though.  Keep highlight tone priority off to reduce noise in the shadows; keep it on if you have blown highlights (I keep it on always).

This is the best book for video production by far:

http://www.amazon.com/Bare-Bones-Camera-Course-Video/dp/0960371818

It's more for old video and film, but it will give you the idea and you can read it in an hour or two, not that you'll want to because it's surprisingly technical and dense for a beginner's book.

The best single lens would be a 24-70mm f2.8 zoom, imo, but your kit is very appropriate for video.  In general, a set of cinema lenses consists of an 18mm, 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm but on the 5D you can multiply those by 1.6X to get the same FOV as super35 and that would be a normal range of focal lengths, 28-135mm (but a 24-105mm zoom will do it, too).  But everyone has different taste.  In my experience, most day exteriors are shot at f4-f5.6, most day interiors at f4, most night interiors at f2.8 and most night exteriors at f2 or thereabouts.  But this varies...David Fincher has recently shot everything wide open and you will see some other movies with very deep focus, obviously, but this is a good starting point, imo.  Use 1/50 shutter (or 1/60 if your source flickers) and ND filters to control your stop.  By a full kit at 77mm:  .3, .6, .9, 1.2, etc. and a polarizer or a variable ND if you don't care about color shifts and step up rings to 77mm for all your lenses with smaller threads.  But the 5D has a bigger sensor than cinema cameras so you can stop down a stop more to get the same depth of field.

Good lighting and camera support (tripod, dolly) will help.  Renting is cheap, too, if you ever need other gear.  The 5DIII isn't great but it's very good for video for the price.  You can do anything with it and a few good lights and lenses.

[NormanBates]

My basic photography tutorial has a section on video, talking about settings, equipment, etc, that you may need or want if you're going to shoot video with a DSLR:
http://www.similaar.com/foto/tuten/600.html

And the "stuff for video" section of my equipment recommendations may be useful too:
http://www.similaar.com/foto/equipment/us_video.html

[HenrikBC]

Ah - the world of video and many an opinion (not unlike photography I believe).

Regardless of what you want to do with the video - just start shooting something. As soon as you have something in the can and review it, it will be easier each time to see what you want to do different - or what gear you suddenly realize you just MUST have in order to net better results.

Best of luck.

[TC1006]

Thank You all for the great suggestions...

What are your thoughts on the CineStyle from Technicolor?

I was also considering purchasing a Rode VideoMic Pro for the offcamera sound...thoughts??

[remsy_atassi]

Cinestyle is way overrated IMO. It is a flat picture style designed to be graded, but the codec of Canon cameras is not good enough to stand up to this kind of color correction. As soon as you even drop in a basic LUT the shadows have picked up an insane amount of noise.

As far as 3rd party picture profiles, I much prefer Marvel's. Typically I just use Neutral though - with sharpness dialed all the way down, contrast down 3 notches, and saturation down two notches. If I'm not planning to grade then I usually with dial in an extra notch or two of contrast and saturation.

Regarding the Rhode video mic I would again shy away from it. They are nice mics but your main issue with the 5D3 will actually be the preamp, and you are better spending some money on an external recorder first. Then you can worry about getting a nice mic - most recorders have an internal mic to start.

[Policar]

Cinestyle is way overrated IMO. It is a flat picture style designed to be graded, but the codec of Canon cameras is not good enough to stand up to this kind of color correction. As soon as you even drop in a basic LUT the shadows have picked up an insane amount of noise.

Read my post above.  Cinestyle is ONLY for shooting b roll or crash cam footage on shoots where the other footage is in log mode.  For anything else it's useless.  It doesn't have more lattitude, it just places brightness values differently.  There are a few cameras that shoot log (Alexa, C300, F3, film scans) and if those are your A cameras and they are shooting in log then cinestyle will give you (trivially) more flexibility and integrate significantly better into your workflow.  I've used my dSLRs a few times as b cameras for 35mm, Red, and Alexa shoots...to be honest it doesn't matter that much but having log footage to intercut with log footage provides flexibility and a common starting point.  In each of those cases we also had some footage shot in neutral mode and it was just a matter of grading it differently.

Otherwise, it is worse in every way than neutral.  Worse tonality, saturation, and skin tones.  More difficult to composite.  For sound (excepting videography in which case that would be appropriate) I would buy a shotgun mic and an external recorder.

[NormanBates]

When it came out, I fell in love with CineStyle, it was a lot easier to grade than previous flat profiles (like Marvels Cine, which, with my limited skills, always leaves me with clay-looking people). A week later, the honeymoon was over, and I was already looking for ways to limit the damage that it was causing to the footage: noise and macroblocking, after grading, were a lot more prominent.

After a lot of tests, I decided there had to be a better way. Trying to get a flat profile that was both easy to grade and relatively noise-free (at least not worse than, say, Neutral with minimum contrast), I created Flaat:
http://www.similaar.com/foto/flaat-picture-styles/index.html

So far it's been a mild success: I've heard from some people having issues with it or not liking it, but I've also received lots and lots of messages from happy users. It's free, give it a try

[Axilrod]

I agree with the sentiments about cinestyle, after grading the image can really fall apart. 

As for video settings, never shoot in Av mode, since the shutter speed is the only thing that stays fixed while shooting video.  Use 1/50 for 24fps and 1/60 for 30fps, and try to use ISO speeds in multiples of 160.  Turn the sharpness all the way down and bump the contrast and saturation down a few clicks.  Aside from that, it's tough to shoot video with a dslr handheld, you need some type of stabilization for sure.  I've spent more than I'd like to admit on DSLR video gear, it can be an expensive endeavor.  If you have a photography background the same rules of composition apply for the most part, you're just constantly capturing the image versus snaps here and there.  There are plenty of resources on the web for shooting DSLR video, just go out and experiment and see what you come up with. 

[Caps18]

I am interested in this topic too.

I want 'easy' good audio though.  And am wondering if it can be done with only carrying a stereo shotgun microphone?  Can the 5D2/5D3 support that?

What some 'behind the scenes' videos on how they shoot different movie and TV segments.  When you watch TV shows, sports, travel shows, or documentaries, watch what scenes they shoot and how they shoot them.  And know that a lot of takes and clips ended up not being used.  Have a plan for what types of shots you want to get ahead of time, and then take extra and impromptu video clips (and audio background sounds).

[Policar]

Good audio requires a good boom mic, good mixer, good lavs placed properly on each actor, and lots of work in post...  That's why it's easiest just to hire someone if you can afford it or live with it if you can't.  Most dialogue is center mix anyway; don't worry about stereo.  That's all done in post.

Cinestyle isn't horrible, it's just that, even though it appears to have better latitude, the tonality is so awful that if you expose even slightly wrong (even if it looks fine on camera it might be bad for the grade) and grade the image can fall apart fast.  If you meter really carefully (not with the camera but with a separate incident meter) cinestyle is relatively harmless, and you can expose in-camera with the built in meter and by eye and get an acceptable result if you set your exposure in another picture style then switch to cinestyle, but given that it has essentially no advantages in a traditional workflow...why bother?

[Videoshooter]

For getting started with video, the main things to consider are proper stabilisation (tripod, monopod, shoulder mount, etc), and audio (a Rode Videomic Pro is a good starting point for ambient sound - dialogue and interviews will require an audio recorder such as the Zoom H4n with either a wireless lav or a boom-mounted shotgun mic).

The biggest mistake I've seen photographers make when shooting video with DSLR is not keeping a steady, continuous shot. Every time I've been given footage from someone who is primarily a photographer, it has constant zooming, framing adjstments, focus adjustments etc. With video you have to rememer that the shot needs to stay steady for a few seconds - a slight framing or cropping adjustment can be fixed in post but if a zoom or framing adjustment occurs in the recorded video it cannot be fixed and ruins the shot.