A Few EOS 7D Mark II Specs [CR1]

[jdramirez]

when the c100, with its 4k technology came out, there was a video about exporting stills from video. It seemed like too much Damn work... review 24000 frames.

[quote =Marsu42 link=topic=21282.msg404354#msg404354 date=1402582107]

The 7DII will be really fast.

For fast, look at mirrorless system ... old-school dslr tech with a flipping mirror taking a lot of straing @high fps is really a technology from the last century. Good for Canon there are enough old-school photogs around

In 10 years from now, you won't even use the 7d2 as a doorstopper because your mirrorless does 100fps+ full res (or you just crop frames from video), has much more shutter cycles before it breaks and does things like "automatically track the bird with the read feathers across the whole frame".

Without wanting to open up a whole huge new area of debate, I remain unconvinced about this. I'm hardly wedded to old school methods or technology, I only took up serious bird photography a couple of years ago. And I hope your optimism about tracking and suchlike are well-founded, but I don't relish having to wade through hundreds or thousands of frames to find the ones that aren't motion blurred or otherwise unusable. There has to be an upper limit of what is workable per session - more than a few hundred takes too long to sort through in a day or two, especially if the shots are very similar.

Others will know more about this, but I've heard that using very fast exposures per frame leads to unappealing-looking video. But you need short exposure times to get fast-moving subjects like birds in flight without motion blur, if you're extracting frames for stills. Seems an unsatisfying compromise.

But we'll see. The mirrorless camera would need similar ergonomics to DSLRs to work with big lenses anyhow, imho.
[/quote]

 

[Sabaki]

As a matter of interest, would an expectation of relatively clean image quality at ISO 1600 be unrealistic for a crop body?

One man's clean is another man's filthy. It's best to speak in comparative terms. For me, if the 7D-II's ISO 3200 image looks as good as the 6D's ISO 6400 image then I'd be very happy with it.

I hear you on that.

As a birder, I dial in ISO 400 on my 500D but just like the 7D, anything over 400 leads to very obvious noise.
Anything over ISO 800, the images become somewhat and probably poorly described as rough.
Useable ISO 3200 would be a very worthwhile reason to buy this camera.

Mind if I ask, is it usually sunny where you shoot? I'm almost never able to do bird shots at ISO 400, and even 800 is low. 1600-3200 normal (this is at f/10 though).

Sure you may ask, no problem.

As I know my 500D isn't the top camera, I work within its limits and I watch my subject and the sun very carefully.

I do not shoot unless my subject has direct light on it. If the bird is bathed in sunlight, I shoot in manual mode at ISO 400 and vary my shutter speed from 1/2000 - 1/4000.

I only do about 5% of my shots above ISO 400. I just do not like the lack of image clarity at the higher ISO's and just do not push my shutter in poor light.

What aperture?

f/5.6. If my shutter speed is above 1/2500 and I'm not compromising my bokeh, I may push my aperture to f/8.0.

 

[mkabi]

when the c100, with its 4k technology came out, there was a video about exporting stills from video. It seemed like too much Damn work... review 24000 frames.

Pssst.... C100 doesn't have 4K.
Typo?

 

[jdramirez]

when the c100, with its 4k technology came out, there was a video about exporting stills from video. It seemed like too much Damn work... review 24000 frames.

Pssst.... C100 doesn't have 4K.
Typo?

It was one of the cinema bodies... I'm not sure which one obviously.

 

[bdunbar79]

Well, not necessarily. I shoot about 400 shots per basketball game and pick the best 60. I can sort them and edit them in one night, maybe 2-3 hours. It's not fun I agree, but not absolutely terrible.

 

[scyrene]

Well, not necessarily. I shoot about 400 shots per basketball game and pick the best 60. I can sort them and edit them in one night, maybe 2-3 hours. It's not fun I agree, but not absolutely terrible.

400 shots is manageable. But at the suggested 100fps that would be just 4 seconds' shots. Even at 30fps you'd be into the thousands in a typical action session. I just don't see video frame extraction as a realistic option for all but the highest profile work.

 

[bdunbar79]

Well, not necessarily. I shoot about 400 shots per basketball game and pick the best 60. I can sort them and edit them in one night, maybe 2-3 hours. It's not fun I agree, but not absolutely terrible.

400 shots is manageable. But at the suggested 100fps that would be just 4 seconds' shots. Even at 30fps you'd be into the thousands in a typical action session. I just don't see video frame extraction as a realistic option for all but the highest profile work.

Oh I see what you were saying. Sorry I misunderstood your post.

 

[jrista]

Well, not necessarily. I shoot about 400 shots per basketball game and pick the best 60. I can sort them and edit them in one night, maybe 2-3 hours. It's not fun I agree, but not absolutely terrible.

400 shots is manageable. But at the suggested 100fps that would be just 4 seconds' shots. Even at 30fps you'd be into the thousands in a typical action session. I just don't see video frame extraction as a realistic option for all but the highest profile work.

Aye. I don't think that everyone who wants a super high stills frame rate understands the immense volumes of data they will be creating. At 30fps, it's bad enough, but I hear mirrorless diehards talking about 60fps or 120fps all too frequently. Could you imagine the data you would have to sift through to find the "best" shot? And before even that...you have to IMPORT it all! A three-second burst at 120fps is 360 images. A three second burst is a SHORT burst, five is average, and when it comes to longer sequences of action, such as is often the case with BIF, you might have 10-15 seconds of continuous frames. At 120fps, that is 1200 - 1800 images!

IMO, frame rates that high for still shooting are just plain and simply not worth it. Having a higher frame rate helps, but there is a point of diminishing returns. I can't imagine I'd ever want more than 20fps at most, and I would be willing to bet that 10-14fps is probably superb. That means every 1/10th to 1/14th of a second you get a frame, which is a pretty darn small timeslice. But 1/60th? Or even 1/120th of a second? The human eye is generally capable of discerning about 1/30th or so when watching video, and we use 1/60th only to completely and totally GUARANTEE that there is no stutter, but we can't actually discern each frame. The problem with stills is, the frames aren't cycles on top of each other, so we can't tell the difference at 1/30th of 1/60th or 1/120th when they are lined up next to each other. It would just be a waste of time, space, and effort (and actually money, as you would need MONSTER memory cards and IMMENSE hard drives to store all that data) to use a stills frame rate that high.

 

[jdramirez]

As a quick counter point... there are certain images that are really hard to get... a ball being compressed by a bat at the moment of contact, a diver just before he puts his fields in the water, etc.

You may have 120 images to sort through, but know which image exactly you want makes it easy enough to find.

But that is about it... no thank you to the remaining 119 images.

 

[jrista]

As a quick counter point... there are certain images that are really hard to get... a ball being compressed by a bat at the moment of contact, a diver just before he puts his fields in the water, etc.

You may have 120 images to sort through, but know which image exactly you want makes it easy enough to find.

But that is about it... no thank you to the remaining 119 images.

I agree, there may be a few rare situations where you want a higher frame rate than 12fps. That said, people get those kinds of shots. They have actually been getting them for years, with equipment older and slower even than we have today. I'm not sure 120fps is necessary. I'm not even sure 30fps is necessary, although it might be the point where diminishing returns have kicked in enough that anything faster would still be pretty useless.

Beyond the point of diminishing returns, you would have many, even dozens of frames of essentially the same thing. At that point, your gathering dozens or hundreds of frames per second so you can choose a more appealing squashed base ball shape...which changes only by a few millimeters per frame. Is that really worth the extra import time and storage requirements and cost?

 

[9VIII]

I just want to clear up some misconceptions about human vision here.

Tests with Air force pilots have shown, that they could identify the plane on a flashed picture that was flashed only for 1/220th of a second.

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

The bottom line is that applying a "framerate" number to human vision is kind of like asking how many pixels are in a painting.
The 24/30fps standard was arrived at by looking at the minimum framerate required to produce an image that people didn't find uncomfortable using the limited equipment available many decades ago.

 

[flyingSquirrel]

A quick backpedal to the vertical grip thing...this is an excerpt from a post I made on another thread regarding that...

I have the 7D battery grip. It is essentially useless to me when shooting wildlife, because I need to select different focus points with the thumb joystick on-the-fly as I am shooting moving subjects. The 7D battery grip obviously does not have the thumb joystick, nor can you reach the built-in body joystick when gripping the battery grip vertically. I rarely shoot vertical wildlife shots simply because I cannot select focus points and control everything easily in vertical format with the subject is moving. If the 7Dmk2 has the pro body with integrated grip similar to the 1D-x with the thumb joystick and everything, I would be thrilled.

If the 7D2 does not have a vertical grip built in, it is highly unlikely that I will purchase an add-on grip, considering it would be the same story as my 7D grip described above. This would be a major disappointment for me.

 

[AvTvM]

Yes it is a problem on the 7d/bg-e7. Luckily there is a really simple solution: just put a second joystick af-selector on the grip. See 5d3 battery grip bg-e11.

A quick backpedal to the vertical grip thing...this is an excerpt from a post I made on another thread regarding that...

I have the 7D battery grip. It is essentially useless to me when shooting wildlife, because I need to select different focus points with the thumb joystick on-the-fly as I am shooting moving subjects. The 7D battery grip obviously does not have the thumb joystick, nor can you reach the built-in body joystick when gripping the battery grip vertically. I rarely shoot vertical wildlife shots simply because I cannot select focus points and control everything easily in vertical format with the subject is moving. If the 7Dmk2 has the pro body with integrated grip similar to the 1D-x with the thumb joystick and everything, I would be thrilled.

If the 7D2 does not have a vertical grip built in, it is highly unlikely that I will purchase an add-on grip, considering it would be the same story as my 7D grip described above. This would be a major disappointment for me.

 

[Maxaperture]

Hope it turns out to be a 1D MkV, and nothing to do with the 7D.
Another 1.3 crop sensor, as was the 1D MkIV,,,,,, or 1.6 crop18Mp sensor would be awesome.

 

[Lee Jay]

As a quick counter point... there are certain images that are really hard to get... a ball being compressed by a bat at the moment of contact, a diver just before he puts his fields in the water, etc.

You may have 120 images to sort through, but know which image exactly you want makes it easy enough to find.

But that is about it... no thank you to the remaining 119 images.

The trouble is, I can do single-shot timing reliably to within 5ms or so, and get within around 2ms at a reliability of around 50%. For spray and pray to do that well, you're going to need in the 200-500fps range. That's pretty fast, and pretty hard to store.

 

[Marsu42]

do the Magic Guys have to begin again from scratch every time they 'assault' a new model or can the previous work be transferred, in the form of pieces of code or at least expertise, from one camera to another?

No, the basic ML codebase stays the same and is very mature by now - i.e. integrating with Canon DryOS as far as setting props and memory allocation is concerned. The 7d1 has a unique catch though which might also apply to the 7d2: real dual digic-processing (and not just offloading the af to a digic).

That's the reason the 7d1 port didn't get started for some years as it wouldn't boot at all, and even now some features don't work at all. In general, my estimation is one year from "Hello World" on a newer camera to a release which has been tested enough so everything works w/o hiccups. *If* a maintainer for the camera is found, and that's not very likely since it's an unpaid job requiring months of man-work. Btw the 6d is unmaintained right now (but somehow working), and so is the 100d (not working at all).

and I thought I read here once, that the 5D3 was the mini 1Dx ;-) ???

I imagine the 5d3's frame rate is still way too slow for pro sports shooting and maybe wildlife - for these it might be a fraction of a second between the and perfect shot you sell and junk that looks like your mom shot it. I'm a flash user and really not a fan of high fps, but if I'd want to be sure to capture the moment I'd rather capture a frame off raw video with enough resolution for most print/web purposes.

Btw if you don't know it: Magic Lantern has not only raw video, but also a "silent pix" function which captures bursts of 60fps+ even on cameras which sd card cannot sustain high write speeds. It even filters out shots that are out of focus, the catch is that it needs live view and doesn't work with af but only locked focus.

The mention that this will be positioned as a Professional APS-C camera is what I hoped for.

Professional also means 1dx-like shutter cycles. Burst with mirror/shutter up in lv have the advantage of not eating through your shutter - but did you ever calculate how long your 5d3 lasts @max fps and 150k warranty cycles ? How long a supposed 7d2 lasts @10+fps ?

 

[Don Haines]

when the c100, with its 4k technology came out, there was a video about exporting stills from video. It seemed like too much Damn work... review 24000 frames.
Without wanting to open up a whole huge new area of debate, I remain unconvinced about this. I'm hardly wedded to old school methods or technology, I only took up serious bird photography a couple of years ago. And I hope your optimism about tracking and suchlike are well-founded, but I don't relish having to wade through hundreds or thousands of frames to find the ones that aren't motion blurred or otherwise unusable. There has to be an upper limit of what is workable per session - more than a few hundred takes too long to sort through in a day or two, especially if the shots are very similar.

Last week I shot a time lapse with 36,940 frames. I can assure you that going through that many images looking for a particular frame is not a trivial task....

 

[Don Haines]

Professional also means 1dx-like shutter cycles. Burst with mirror/shutter up in lv have the advantage of not eating through your shutter - but did you ever calculate how long your 5d3 lasts @max fps and 150k warranty cycles ? How long a supposed 7d2 lasts @10+fps ?

3 hours

 

[Marsu42]

3 hours

Now, people with a calculator and a phone could also figure out how many $ this is per minute considering the cost of a shutter replacement (parts and service) .. I don't know how long the mirror construction holds, I guess the shutter itself is the first thing that breaks.

 

[Austin]

A quick backpedal to the vertical grip thing...this is an excerpt from a post I made on another thread regarding that...

I have the 7D battery grip. It is essentially useless to me when shooting wildlife, because I need to select different focus points with the thumb joystick on-the-fly as I am shooting moving subjects. The 7D battery grip obviously does not have the thumb joystick, nor can you reach the built-in body joystick when gripping the battery grip vertically. I rarely shoot vertical wildlife shots simply because I cannot select focus points and control everything easily in vertical format with the subject is moving. If the 7Dmk2 has the pro body with integrated grip similar to the 1D-x with the thumb joystick and everything, I would be thrilled.

If the 7D2 does not have a vertical grip built in, it is highly unlikely that I will purchase an add-on grip, considering it would be the same story as my 7D grip described above. This would be a major disappointment for me.

Why don't you just turn the 7D vertically so the back of your hand is facing up?

Maybe Canon will add a joystick to the grip for the 7DII. I would be surprised to see that though.

I think there is about a zero percent chance the 7D's successor will come griped like a 1D. It would be too bulky for many a potential buyer. Canon's not going to want to put off potential customers who value the compactness of a 7D type body, just to satisfy people in the minority like yourself who would enjoy carrying the bulk of a 1D just so it has a vertical joystick.

AND anyone that does want a grip can just buy it separately - more money for canon. You do know that they like when you buy extra things for your camera, right. And for anyone STILL not satisfied having a grip without a joystick can go with a 1Dsomething.

I really think you'll have two options when the 7DII comes out. Hold your camera vertically, or buy a 1D.