Canon 5D vs XH A1

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David Evans

Well-known member
Hi!

I have a Canon XH A1 wich I always use with a SGBlade to achieve DOF goodness. I was trying to simplify my rig and also be able to get a good steadycam that wouldn't cost me $3000 just because of the weight of the camera + Blade + lens. So I thought of the Canon 5D Mark II. Everyone's raving about it. Sure it's supposed to take pictures but it also shot an entire episode of House. How will it behave in comparison to my camera? I've never tried one, so I wanted to know some opinions here. Oh, and also one more thing, if I choose to go with the 5D, are there any big differences between the Mark I and Mark II? I've read it was just a matter of better IS, but with a Merlin steadycam I probably couldn't care less about IS...

Let me know your thoughts please :)

David
 
The problems with steadicam/flying a camera are that you can't really touch the lens or camera much. The deeper DOF on the A1 is a big advantage. In this type of use the 5D is at a disadvantage. (Yes you can use super wide lenses to keep things in focus and fight barrel distortion, but what's the point in handicapping yourself.)

The 5D has moire and aliasing issues if you shoot repetitive patterns on shirts, bricks, tiles, wall paper, etc. The A1 does not.

The 5D is a CMOS camera and skews images with movement side to side badly, like walking around. The A1 is a CCD camera and has not skew from side to side, its distortion is up and down (not often encountered when flying a camera.)

Even though the A1 is 1440 wide (1.33 aspect ratio), but everything on the camera is optimized to that resolution. It was way ahead of its time and delivers better results than many supposed 1920 wide cameras. The 5D does pixel binning, line skipping, etc to end up with less actual resolution.

The A1 would be among my first choices for a crane camera. It was the main camera used for Crank2 for a reason (all the action.) [A weird movie, but good camera work. The A1 footage is brilliant.]
 
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