The emer­gence of Canon DSLR video has been a tri­umph and a strug­gle for wannabe Steven Spielberg’s, me included. The tri­umph is the undoubted qual­ity of the image, and the cre­ative avenues opened up by the wide vari­ety of lenses available.

The strug­gle includes the intro­duc­tion of so much new ter­mi­nol­ogy, so many new ways to be cre­ative and to fail mis­er­ably, and the inevitable havoc caused to well estab­lished work­flows with the intro­duc­tion of video. This post out­lines my efforts to arrive at some­thing resem­bling a usable work­flow for video, using  MPEG Stream­clip, Adobe Pre­miere Pro, and YouTube.

Cam­era Settings

• Movie Mode: Depend­ing on whether you have your Canon 7D set to PAL or NTSC, you are nor­mally pre­sented with 3 real options:
  • 1080P @23.97 Frames/Second or “24P”: This is the Movie Pro’s choice for the sup­posed cin­e­matic look.
  • 1080P @25 Frames/Second for PAL or 30 Frames/Second for NTSC
  • 720P @50 Frames/Second for PAL or 60 Frames/Second for NTSC. This is the set­ting I use. Why? Mainly because it is the best bal­ance between good qual­ity and accept­able file size. Also, con­vert­ing, edit­ing, play­ing back HD clips takes a lot of pro­cess­ing power, which not every­one has.
• Shut­ter Speed: For best results Canon rec­om­mends a shut­ter speed between 1/<video frame rate> to 1/125 of a sec­ond. Click here for more.
• Aper­ture: One of the great ben­e­fits of Canon DSLR video is the abil­ity to use fast lenses, so this is very much a cre­ative decision.
• ISO: For low­est noise, this excel­lent arti­cle from Mar­vels Films  sug­gest using one of 160, 320, 640, 1250, 3200.
• High­light Tone Pri­or­ity: The inter­webs sug­gest leav­ing HTP off to reduce band­ing in the movie files, as men­tioned in this forum.
• Noise Reduc­tion: With mov­ing images, noise isn’t the same issue it is for photo’s. This can be turned off.
• White Bal­ance: As with pho­tog­ra­phy, try and set this before shoot­ing. Saves pain later.
• Image Sta­bi­liza­tion: Some seem to imply that using image sta­bi­liza­tion helps reduce jit­ter / flicker in your movies… BUT if you are using the inbuilt mic, you can hear the lens motor all the time!
• Pic­ture Style: After see­ing this YouTube video, I was using the Canon Neu­tral style to pre­serve shadow and high­light detail, as in the movie at the top of this post. More sea­soned Movie Pro’s employ cus­tom Pic­ture Styles, as excel­lently out­lined in this video:

Shoot­ing

Shoot­ing video with a Canon 7D brings with it a num­ber of ergonomic chal­lenges, which many com­pa­nies have sought to address with Find­ers, Fol­low Focus, Matte Boxes, Con­tact Rigs. These can all add up, but if you have the money to spend, get a load of this:

If you are not in this cat­e­gory, and are impro­vis­ing with their exist­ing pho­to­graphic sup­ports and tech­niques, as I am, then I can share the following:

• Shoot more, shorter clips than fewer longer ones. Cam­era shake, noise, etc. will be less notice­able in your final edited movie as the viewer will have less time to notice erratic move­ment on-screen.
• If you plan on chang­ing zoom, or focus, then you bet­ter be using a tri­pod or mono­pod, as it looks wob­bly as hell if you try to do it hand-held.
• A lot of sites rec­om­mend man­ual focus, mostly for the cre­ative cin­e­matic effect of bring a scene into focus, but if you are shoot­ing hand­held, I would go for a larger F-stop with focus at infin­ity. This is espe­cially impor­tant if you are shoot­ing mov­ing objects.
• Aper­ture Pri­or­ity, Time Pri­or­ity are com­pletely ignored when shoot­ing video. They become Pro­gram Mode, where you adjust expo­sure using Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion. If you are deal­ing with erratic light­ing or have a cre­ative goal in mind, Full Man­ual is the way to go.
• The built-in Mic in the Canon 7D is fairly poor, and just “loves” the wind! I nearly always over­lay my movie clips with music for this reason.

Transcod­ing

Ah yes, now to the heart of some of the dif­fi­cul­ties. If you think the range of pho­to­graphic file for­mats was com­pli­cated, wait till you get a load of movie file for­mats! You’ve got con­tain­ers, codecs, com­pres­sion set­tings, frame rates, dimen­sions, asso­ci­ated sound for­mats, sam­pling rates… it goes on and on. Let’s start with a cou­ple of def­i­n­i­tions from Wikipedia:

A video codec is a device or soft­ware that enables video com­pres­sion and/or decom­pres­sion for dig­i­tal video.

And

A con­tainer or wrap­per for­mat is a meta-file for­mat whose spec­i­fi­ca­tion describes how data and meta­data are stored.

My knowl­edge is very far from in-depth at this stage, but the rea­son why Canon 5D Mk II and 7D movie edit­ing has pre­oc­cu­pied many peo­ple on the web is that the file for­mat cho­sen by Canon (using the H.264 codec in a Quick­time MOV con­tainer) is a great bal­ance between qual­ity and size for play­back but ter­ri­ble for editing.

The rea­son for this is the video com­pres­sion used, which uti­lizes Groups of Pic­tures, where only every 15th frame of the movie is a com­plete frame, and the inter­me­di­ary frames are cal­cu­lated based on dif­fer­ences from this com­plete frame. As you scrub for­ward and back­wards in your edit­ing soft­ware, search­ing for clips to extract, your CPU needs to work over­time to cal­cu­late and re-calculate movie frames as you make edits. Some edit­ing pro­grams do this bet­ter than oth­ers, with Sony Vegas, AVID Media Com­poser, and Pin­na­cle Stu­dio com­ing in for men­tion. Try scrub­bing through Canon 7D movie footage in Adobe Pre­miere Pro and you will think that your CPU’s are going to melt!

Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS5 is meant to be a vast improve­ment in this area, imple­ment­ing native sup­port for Canon DSLR movie footage. This improve­ment is enabled by a move to 64Bit, a new ren­der­ing engine called Mer­cury, and sup­port for real-time ren­der­ing on a num­ber of high-end nVidia CUDA enabled graph­ics cards.

While I have vastly sim­pli­fied this expla­na­tion, you can now get some idea why movie files like this are so hard to edit, so the approach taken by most peo­ple is to transcode or con­vert the out-of-the-camera movie files to a for­mat which is less CPU inten­sive to work with. The three main approaches that I have read about are:

1. Con­vert to ProRes which is a Codec sup­plied by Apple as part of Final Cut Stu­dio. Which means you need to buy Final Cut Stu­dio. And a Mac. $$$$
2. Con­vert to Neoscene which is a Codec sup­plied by Cine­form. This Codec is com­pat­i­ble with Adobe Pre­miere Pro, but it does cost US$129.
3. Con­vert to DNxHD sup­plied by AVID which many in would con­sider to be the leader in HD Video Edit­ing. The basic Codec can be down­loaded for free here. You need to also get a copy of the free MPEG Stream­clip from Squared 5 to accom­plish the conversion.

The avail­abil­ity of a trial down­load of Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS5, which brings with it greater native sup­port for DSLR video and much improved per­for­mance dur­ing play­back and edit­ing, allowed me to com­pare edit­ing per­for­mance as can be seen in the fol­low­ing sequence of screenshots:

I am unable to show Cine­form Neoscene as my trial had expired and I don’t plan on pur­chas­ing it after see­ing what Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS5 can do. Pend­ing an upgrade, Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS4 is still my day-2-day video edi­tor, and I chose the last, free option of AVID DNxHD and MPEG Stream­clip. After installing these to com­po­nents, here is how to go about per­form­ing the transcode:

1. File, Open 7D file.
2. File, Export to Quicktime.
3. Choose AVID DNxHD.
4. Click Options but­ton beside the AVID DNxHD choice, which brings up a con­fus­ing look­ing dia­log win­dow. There is a bug in the layout.
5. Set Color lev­els RGB.
6. Click the tiny sliver of a box at the bot­tom of the win­dow, and a drop down box will appear, allow­ing you to select the bit rate for DNxHD. As I demon­strated with the screen­shots above, you may need to exper­i­ment to see what works best for your edit­ing work­flow, but ensure you pick the same res­o­lu­tion and frame rate as the source clip.
7. Hover over the Uncom­pressed selec­tion and the OK but­ton will appear. This is another bug. Click OK.
8. Set qual­ity to 100% (again this is some­thing to be exper­i­mented with).
9. Uncheck Inter­laced Scaling.
10. Ensure that “1920x1080 unscaled” is selected (or the rel­e­vant unscaled res­o­lu­tion for your source clip).
11. Click “Make Movie”

Edit­ing

I tested the waters with a num­ber of video edi­tors, including:

• Microsoft Win­dows Live Video (I can’t believe that I am even admit­ting this, but it worked fine!)
• Pin­na­cle Stu­dio HD (based on the advice from this Photoframd Blog post)
• Pre­miere Ele­ments 7

As I stated at the begin­ning, and alluded too at a num­ber of other points, I even­tu­ally set­tled on Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS4, which I am lucky enough to have as part of the Adobe Mas­ter Col­lec­tion.  No point hav­ing all that pro­fes­sional soft­ware if I don’t use it! For me, the eas­i­est way to learn this prod­uct is to watch a num­ber of the excel­lent tuto­r­ial series on Youtube, such as this one from Sese­s­tro:

I won’t go into great detail here about the edit­ing process, as that in itself would make up a very very long post, but will make the observations:

1. When cre­at­ing a new project in Pre­miere Pro you will need to cre­ate a new pre­set based on the nature of the video files you will be using, i.e. you shot 24p
2. I am still tip­toe­ing cre­atively when it comes to edit­ing, using sim­ple stan­dard Cross Dis­solves / Dips to Black
3. I am not using any exter­nal sound record­ing, and the Mic on the Canon 7D just loves back­ground noise and wind, so I mostly over­lay music on the clips
4. If you have imported a lot of media, some of which you have trimmed, oth­ers you haven’t used at all, cre­at­ing a new “Trimmed” project at the end and delet­ing the orig­i­nal is a great way of con­serv­ing disk space.

Export­ing

I am not really churn­ing out suf­fi­ciently long (or suf­fi­ciently high qual­ity for that mat­ter) videos to want to cre­ate DVD’s or Blu­Rays… cur­rently. When it comes to export­ing, I typ­i­cally have the fol­low­ing two tar­gets in mind:

1. Web Video: mainly YouTube, but for a more pro­fes­sional feel I am also look­ing at Vimeo.
2. iPhone / iPod Touch: My iPhone is my photo album, my slide col­lec­tion, my pri­mary method of phys­i­cally shar­ing with those around me.

Once you are done in Pre­miere with your edits, you need to ren­der or export your project for the appro­pri­ate des­ti­na­tion. I am not famil­iar with your ver­sion of Pre­miere Pro but these are the gen­eral set­tings I use, much of which is based on the guid­ance from this YouTube and this Vimeo sup­port page :

• Orig­i­nals: the fewer re-encodings or transcod­ings between orig­i­nal file and YouTube the better
• Aspect Ratio: don’t change the aspect ratio if possible
• Res­o­lu­tion & Frame rate: again, don’t change the res­o­lu­tion or frame rate
• TV Stan­dard: I am not sure whether this has a major bear­ing, but if you shot in PAL you should export in PAL (same for NTSC)
• Con­tain­ers & For­mats: While YouTube and Vimeo both sup­port a wide vari­ety of import for­mats, stick­ing with H264 in a MP4 con­tainer seems to be the best option

Finally

So that’s it, my longest, most involved blog post to date. Writ­ing this has helped me col­lect together the var­i­ous snip­pets of knowl­edge required to pro­duce some­thing approx­i­mat­ing a qual­ity video.

Hope­fully it will be use­ful to all of you as well.

For fur­ther read­ing, please visit:

• Canon Dig­i­tal Learn­ing Cen­ter: Har­ness­ing the Power of the EOS 7D’s Video System
• Philip Bloom: Arti­cles about DSLR Video
• Cinema5D: Orig­i­nally cre­ated for 5D, but rel­e­vant to 7D as well
• Planet5D: 5D and 7D News
• DVINFO: Canon 7D Video Forum
• Vimeo: Canon 7D Group