Want to buy this camera and i have a few questions

M

Moath

Member
Bear in mind, i have been filming videos with sony cameras before, i feel like i want to upgrade to HD and i've been thinking the 7d is a good camera since i can afford it + its a solid still camera and many other things ofcourse, for the questions

1- I have read that when filming 1920x1080 - at 24, 25 or 30
You can shoot 12 mins on a 4 Gb Card, 49 mins on a 16 Gb card,
I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is, is the info above with or without the camera's realtime compression?

2- What is the best memory card to use when shooting hours of video? If 49 minutes fit into a 16 gb card, then i think getting two 32 gb memory cards will be a good idea

3- What is the native video format of the Canon camera? Is it a special kind or .mov files?

4- I read that if i want to edit the cannon's video on Final cut pro, i need to convert the video using ProRes, will this effect the quality/resoultion of the video @ all?

5- Does it have an internal mic? Is it any good? Can i connect an external mic to it?

Many thanks
 
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1) As I understand it, the 12 minute limit per clip in HD is because the CF cards are formatted as FAT32 which only allows for a 4 gig file size. There is also a limit on the standard record time in order to circumvent some European law that imposes additional taxes on devices that can record over a certain amount of video. The video is only recorded with the compression.


2) Canon recommends udma enabled cards. I saw a video where a Canon rep said that using lower end card can affect the quality of video recorded.

3) The camera records .mov files with h264 compression. This opens natively in quicktime.

4) You don't have to convert it from h264 to edit, but unless you have a very powerful computer, you may need to. h264 is very processor intensive and may not play smoothly on your computer, making editing a pain. When you convert from h264 to pro-res or other higher end codec (lossless), you shouldn't see any quality loss - the file sizes will be much larger though. It's when you convert to some other lossy codec - or reconvert to h264 that you will loose some quality.


5) yes it has an internal mic - not very good. Yes you can use an external mic, the camera has a stereo mini plug as a mic input. If you intend to use a shotgun, you need to make sure it can be supplied with battery powered phantom power - as the camera has no phantom power.
 
Thanks for the prompt reply,

When you it has a stereo miniplug, you mean its the normal connection same as the one used by standard headphones right?

Another Q, is this camera good with filming timelapses?
 
Yes, it's great for timelapse, but doesn't have a built-in intervalometer--kind of an odd oversight, given it seems like an easy thing to enable in software, and arch-rival Nikon has it in the D300S.

So you need to get a separate intervalometer for it.
 
I'm sorry I'm very new to still cameras, but is the intervalometer the feature that allows you to film timelapse? I.e. One second every 5 minutes etc.,

How can it film a timelapse otherwise? I need to buy this device and attach it?
 
The eos utility that comes with the camera allows timelapse. I just shot this a couple of days ago with my canon rebel xti - hooked to a laptop via usb. I believe the 7d does it the same way.

 
JoeC said:
The eos utility that comes with the camera allows timelapse.
Click to expand...

You mean the camera comes with software that allows it to film timelapses by hooking it up to the laptop. Meaning you control the whole thing from a laptop?
 
Yeah that is actually pretty cool, although i when did some googling people were saying it didn't have a native way of filming a timelapse but this is good enough for me, i'm think i'm gona buy the camera by the end of this week
 
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