[Konvas] the Canon 7D (off-topic)

[Adam Frey]

colcam at aim.com wrote:
>  Canon has been testing a "larger chip" dv camera in EOS mount-- no mirror.

No mirror, meaning deeper seated lenses? So it's possible we could use 
our OCT18/OCT19 mounted lenses? That would be great - of course, I hope 
the Canon-without-a-mirror is as affordable as the 7D is...

I'm happy with the HD image on the 7D. At 48Mbps, the H.264 won't play 
back on my 2Ghz laptop without heavy skipping. I'm currently putting 
together a corporate promo that I shot with both the 7D and the Z1U 
(roughly half and half). I'm having a harder time in post with the 7D 
footage, just because it's twice the size (48Mbps vs 25Mbps) and the 
H.264 compression is so much heavier on the encoding (meaning it needs a 
much faster computer to decode - btw, the raw footage even skips on my 
8-core Mac Pro under both Premiere and Final Cut, running on a 4-disk 
RAID0 array). Doing the math, it's about 360MB per minute, which is 
already some serious throughput, plus it has to decode the video.

Looks-wise, the 7D footage blows away what I shot with the Z1U. Much 
like the Z1U, the 7D does seem to be a little noisy in the shadows 
though, but I shot almost everything at 1600 ISO, which may be part of 
the culprit (will be doing a few more tests this weekend). I'm not going 
to put it side-by-side with the Konvas just yet, but eventually I'd like 
to do a comparison, just for my own personal notes...

BTW: I wonder if it could be a matter of time before we see a higher 
H.264 bitrate coming off the camera? Could we be so bold as to hope for 
a raw-esque codec as well? Hmmm... Just Bing'd for it and this popped 
up: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?p=478766 - So, we may get 
RAW video from the Canon after all...

And, speaking of which, if the footage does get into "RAW" territory, 
will our older LOMO and other cine lenses hold up against the Canon 
sensors (since Digital does not equal Film)? This is pure speculation, 
but I'm assuming the sensors will be more critical, since they don't 
have movement/registering like film. I'm also assuming Canon will keep 
building their cameras & sensors to look their absolute best when used 
for still photography and with still lenses. The use of cine lenses will 
probably not be on their radar; especially older cine lenses.

> BTW, has anyone else posted things lately and not gotten them?

This is most likely related to your mail server(s) being busy, more than 
an issue with the list server. The list server is sending the messages 
out, and also putting them online. You can always check to see if your 
message posted to get an idea if it was a problem with your mail server 
or a problem with the list server:
http://konvas.org/list-archives.html

Think about it as if it were a phone call: you call, you get a busy 
signal, you call back later. But after a few calls, where it's busy 
every time, you eventually stop trying (and drop it), or else your other 
workloads would get too backed up. Much like a phone call, the list 
server has a limit on how many times it tries to connect to everyone's 
individual mail server before it drops the individual message out of the 
queue (it only effects people who have very busy mail servers - everyone 
else on the list should receive the message without issue).


Cheers,

Adam Frey
Director/Cinematographer
Crimson Chain Productions
http://crimsonchainproductions.com
Cell: 301-639-7146

Crimson Chain Productions
PO Box 35
Libertytown, MD 21762