Shooting RAW on the Canon 5D mark III DSLR is still very POPULAR. You get stunning 14-bit moving images for a fraction of the price of a “real” RAW camera and the advantages of a full-frame sensor that is good in lowlight. But like many other shooters I learned that it’s not always a good idea to use the 5D mark III RAW for a project. Here I’d like to share some points to consider. I recently wrote an article outlining the latest development on the Magic Lantern RAW hack for the 5D mark III: Shooting RAW on a Canon 5D mark III in 2014 – What you have to know In this article I mentioned that using the 5D mark III as a RAW camera is not suitable for productions with bigger budgets as the workflow will slow you down and it is not laid out for professional production. I’d like to elaborate on that. Certainly there are many great features Magic Lantern RAW provides aside from RAW itself like it improves the overall usability of the camera, runs independently on an SD card, gives you more camera INFORMATION (eg.: battery status), zebras, peaking, etc. If you’re interested to shoot RAW on a Canon 5D mark III then we have a step-by-step guide for that: LINK Above the text here’s a little advert I recently shot on the Canon 5D mark III with its RAW functionality. Planning and pulling off this project as a 2-man crew was fun and also challenging. But I didn’t expect the camera I chose would slow down the production so much. After this project I realised that it could be unwise to choose Magic Lantern RAW for some commercial productions, so I thought I should share the experience since we’ve written a lot about that camera on cinema5D so far. In summary I think out of the 2 weeks I needed to shoot this project I lost about 4 days to the 5D. In other words I think I would have been 4 days faster with an Arri ALEXA for example. In a production environment booking even a small crew for 4 additional days usually costs more than renting a more expensive camera. This is of COURSE a different situation and decision from project to project, so let me just share some of the points to consider. What to consider: The 5D mark III was not designed to be a RAW cinema camera. It is a PHOTO camera and its ergonomics will not always work for you. RAW means a lot of data, means more time and storage needed. And WORKING with image sequences… Accurately checking data can mean downloading and transcoding first, which can be time consuming. On-camera playback is limited. We had a card failure on a Lexar 1000x card. It fried. Exposure displayed is not always right. No timecode. Bugs. Camera freezes. Resets settings… complicated RAW workflow
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 05:16:39 +0000
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