D7000 Video Review for PPA Mag and Test Video

[bladeronner]

I've started writing articles for PPA Mag on video production. Here's my review of the D7000 with a link to a test video at the end. In the review I give my overall recommendation. For those of you who've used the camera, I'd love to get your take on my review.

Read it here.

P.S. As matthew77 has pointed out in a few other posts, you CAN effectively use lenses with manual exposure rings to adjust aperture on the fly. Many of the event filmmakers I deal with are coming from a traditional camcorder background and their switch to DSLRs involve AF style lenses without manual aperture rings, so that was the audience I had in mind when addressing that issue.

 

[Granjow]

(Motion JPEG vs. Apple’s h.264)

Apple’s?

First, the D7000 has both a high quality video recording setting (at about 22 mbits/second on average) and a “normal” quality setting (at about 12 mbits/second). Both those compression rates are significantly lower than what you get from the Canon DSLRs, which have rates that average from 35 to about 48 mbits/second. If you haven’t already guessed, the higher the rate, the better the quality.

Not necessarily.
MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 with same bit rate do not share the same quality.
H.264 and H.264 neither. There are lots of optional tweaks you can use to save some bits (at the cost of increased computational power).
Quality is not equal to file size.

Nevertheless interesting review, I liked the introduction!