When Apple updated iLife in January and iMovie 09 was announced, it sounded like a great way for a Mac owning 5D MkII user with little experience of video editing to have a bash at putting some clips together. In particular, the benefits over the previous version of iMovie looked appealing, particularly the image stabilization capability (which we’ll address in a later article in this series).
So iMovie 09 seemed to be a great solution until you actually imported the 5D MkII clips into it and tried to scrub across them. The result of scrubbing invariably led to an instantaneous crash of the app. This lit up the support boards at Apple and elsewhere, resulting in Apple’s official statement on the matter:
Now firstly, I should say that this solution from Apple is not the end of the world. If you are primarily going to upload your footage onto Vimeo or YouTube, or if you were going to view it with an AppleTV then the output is going to look just fine. On the other hand, if like many others you can’t stomach the idea of downgrading your beautifully composed 1080p footage in order to edit then it looked like you were going to need to get more serious and lay down more cash for Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere CS4.
But no, there is a solution. Converting the Canon 5D MkII H.264 .mov files to Apple Intermediate Codec allows you to edit the full 1080p content on iMovie 09 just fine.
So how to you do this? First, dowload a copy of MPEG Streamclip from www.squared5.com. When you open MPEG Streamclip just drag the Canon 5D MkII video files you want to convert onto the window. Note that MPEG Streamclip will join all of the separate clips into one large file during the conversion which I actually find convenient, but others may want to convert each file separately - unfortunately there is no built in method for batching this.
Go to File>Export to Quicktime…
This will bring up the following dialog:
Make sure that the settings are as shown above (the important ones are highlighted) and then hit Make Movie.
The one downside of using Apple Intermediate Codec, or indeed any other more editing friendly is that the file size will be larger than your original file. To give an example, a short 11 second clip straight out of the Canon 5D MkII is around 50MB, when converted to Apple Intermediate Codec using the above settings this more than doubles in size to close to 105MB. But hey storage is getting cheaper every day!
Anyway, I hope this helps you in getting your 1080p footage into iMovie 09. We’ll be covering more more iMovie 09 features with the Canon 5D MkII in future articles so check back soon.
For several reasons I’ve recently started to look a bit more seriously at the legality (or should that be illegality) of just placing any music track onto my amateur 5D MkII films. As most of us are making films pretty much for our own pleasure a lot of us don’t think twice of adding a track from our iTunes library. We plan to address this subject in the future on the Cutting Room so I won’t go into detail right now, but just wanted to point out an option for those of you that want to take a very safe approach.
Moby has set up a site (www.mobygratis.com) that allows independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short to download a selection of close to 80 different tracks. Should you subsequently release the film commercially, Moby promises that the licensing fees will be very reasonable and will go to charity.
Check out the man himself introducing Mobygratis:
Kevin Reylek has put together an interesting review article with B&H Photovideo that reviews the leading external microphones available for the Canon 5D MkII. The review focuses on the Rode VideoMic, the Rode Stereo VideoMic and the Sennheiser MKE 400 and includes a set of audio files that allow you to compare the outputs of each of the devices with their various filter options.
The conclusion of the article is that the $199 Sennheiser MKE 400 is the clear winner in terms of compact size and weight, while the Rode Stereo VideoMic at $249 offers great customization options and is the most practical stereo option tested (albeit it was the only stereo mic tested!)
Back in December, Vincent Laforet had less kind things to say about the Sennheiser products and recommended the Rode Stereo Video Mic as a good solution - as long as you don’t want to look through the viewfinder when it is mounted on the hotshoe.
As you might expect there has been a reasonable amount of discussion on Cinema5D about microphones, including some hissing and gain issues with the Sennheiser which raises a few concerns.
Taking all of these views into account as well as looking at the sample videos posted below, right now, if you want a self powered mic to use onboard the 5D MkII then EOScars would lay the cash down for Read more
Shameless self promotion, but if you haven’t done so already, please check out the EOScars’s main site. The EOScars.com aims to provide a central hub for the best Canon 5D MkII movies available on the web. The Canon 5D MkII is providing experienced film makers, as well as a whole tranch of new videographers with still photography backgrounds, a budget route to create high quality 1080p video with all the benefits of a low noise 35mm sensor.
One of our biggest issues (in addition to how to control the aperture, and how on earth you edit the footage once you’ve managed to capture it!) since the Canon 5D MkII was launched last year has been trawling through all of the random video posts made with this camera in order to see the best movies. You know the kind of stuff, “my first low light shots”, “5D MkII color test”, “My cat licks its paws”, etc. are all prevalent on the main video sharing sites such as vimeo, smugmug, viddyou, google video and youtube and make it challenging to find the movies you actually want to watch and learn from.
We’ve basically just put together a site which includes our view of the best Canon 5D MkII movies on the web and allows you to watch them in one place. So if you want an easy way to check out some high quality short films made on the Canon 5D MkII then please check out the site - and don’t forget to rate the films you view.
