Alright a report from the field here - shot a promo on a 50D raw the other day. Apologies if it's a bore but may be handy for any thread stalkers like me planning a shoot!:
First things first - the latest versions are getting incredibly stable given what they're doing. equivalent to the red MX i'd say...
I was shooting on 2 x 32GB Sandisk extreme 60mbs (these were fine for the 50D's sizes up to a point, I was shooting 720p or just above to make sure I wasn't burning through cards at a silly rate) & 1x 64gb 1000x komputerbay. Couple of idiosyncrasies with both of these cards - first the Sandisk wouldn't give an up to date read-out of available space and would 'pop' the camera when full requiring a battery pull. I'm guessing this was because they're slower, but overrall I head less crashes with these than the Komputerbay, which I guess comes from build quality.
I'm wondering if you could chance a 400x transcend, anyone have any experience with this? If I was shooting regularly on the 50D I think a Nexto SSD backup would probably be a good investment - you reallllllly burn through the cards so something to just back something up immediately would be fantastic. Obviously no duplicate so it'd be at your own peril. Any idea if a less hungry (12 bit?) format has progressed any further? Or if this is even possible...
Towards the end of the day, having shot outdoors on a relatively sunny one, I had some problems with overheating setting the framerate back from 30.4 to 22. 10 minute break to cool off fixed this.
Battery's, I had 6 - 4 old & 2 new + a battery grip. I bought the two new ones for this shoot and i'm now of the opinion that anyone suffering quick battery drain has got old, dud batts. The two new lasted virtually all of the first day of shooting & I fired through the old 4 in another 2 hours. Given that I already have the grip i'm going to shoot on eneloop rechargeable AAs next time, should offer a good bit more capacity. Really, you're going to burn through your cards at a 5/1 ratio to your batteries at least so it's not too much of a concern.
Exposure, no problems. I generally shot under 1-2 stops outdoors as I wanted to get the sky in & I trusted id be able to pull what I needed out of the blacks - and you can.
Having no playback...yknow, if you need to show clients rushes on set then this camera's ruled out. Dont bother with DaVinci, it can't deal with CDNG's out of the 50D - I went through after effects and pre-graded every shot which was a long process but actually a godsend when it comes to editing as everything is halfway there. Given it took me 3 days to transcode everything for editing - this camera is for labours of love, where you have time in post. But the aesthetic is absolutely, hands down, unbelievable. I much prefer it to blackmagic & i'd say it's closest aesthetic is Alexa. I really cannot rave about the image quality enough - beautiful.
