"If I Could Only Fly" Short film and written experience with Canon 7D Raw 14bit

Started by jdub1003, September 27, 2020, 07:38:13 PM

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jdub1003

Hey ML friends!

I had picked up a 7D a few months ago and had done some testing with the raw video features on there. I kept telling the director/writer on my production team that I was dying to shoot a short film using just this camera and the 14bit raw it has to offer. Finally he wrote something for me and we got our chance this weekend and drove out to the desert/mountains with the 7D in hand and a couple 64 gb computer bay CF cards with ML on them.

To say I was scared during the entire shoot would be an understatement. Besides not really being able to watch footage back cleanly (MLV viewing module is great but when on a time crunch the footage plays back to slow, I mainly used it to just verify that footage indeed made its way onto the card.) I was in constant fear of dropped frames in the middle of scenes or just corrupt files in general.

Despite this fear I made the creative choice to continue to use the 7D on this shoot and man am I glad I did. I accepted the 7D as a 10+ year old camera and once I got that in my mind nothing could stop me. I embraced the noise as a creative style for this rather than trying to fight it.

My workflow:
Canon 7D Running Magic Lantern 1728*976 16:9 (The 2k crop and unknown limited recording time as well as space forced me to use a lower resolution here but I'm not mad about that. It's not about the K's I always say it's about the quality of those K's and the 7D in raw has some high quality HD)

We shot everything in one evening. I only pushed ISO to 3200 once. everything else was 1600 or below. As I said above I embraced the noise as a "creative touch".

MLV App to convert the raw files. I used the Alexa default flat profile preset and then exported everything to Pro Res 422 HQ in 1920x1080.

Edited in FCPX as well as color corrected there. I usually use a creative LUT or creative colors but honestly once we adjusted our exposure I was loving the colors coming out of the profile we had exported from so we just left it.

I'm super impressed. We usually shoot on an EOS R or a GH5 and I can say that the colors that come out of this camera even in the lower resolution are just mind blowing.

Would I do this again? Honestly as fun as it was and as creative as it was, I have purchased a Z Cam E2-M4 cinema camera for it's raw features and laid the old 7D to rest selling it to someone who probably has no idea on the quality it can truly provide them.

Hope you all enjoy this short film!




IDA_ML

Nice work, really! I am happy to see that there still are people who enjoy the excellent video quality and cinematic look of the classical 7D.  Although some people call me "7D fan boy" I kept mine for the same reasons that you described.  And although I also have the much more ML capable EOS-M, if I need this amazing filmic look, I still use the good old 7D.  And, just like you, I never regretted!

jdub1003

Thank you!! It was such a unique experience working with this camera in this way for something that was slightly higher stakes. I've never seen a digital camera look this close to film before straight out of the camera.

viccho

great job.
what was your lens? i try to do a short movie too but i found the crop display in live view (same res as you) not easy to use.
I did youy manage the cropped image ?
thank you

viccho

"I did youy manage the cropped image ?" = "how did you managed the cropped image?"

viccho

and how didi you do to shoot more than 7 secondes?, i'm limited to 7sec more or less.
thank you