For this test I wanted to try out the new Canon 7D ML raw ability on a longer shoot. The goal was to see how good of a image we could get while also telling a short narrative. All the clips were shot at 1728x972 with a 1000x Komputerbay 64GB card.
The first thing I noticed is that the 7D is still prone to over heating on long shoots. There were times we would stop and dump the footage solely because the camera needed to cool down and was dropping frames or producing too many corrupted frames. Ice packs were used several times. It was Texas in August, but were always in the shade and so this was disappointing to learn that raw recording doesn't produce any less heat for the 7D. I haven't made the switch over to .mlv, but I've read that it produces less corrupted frames, so I will be switching soon.
We shot separate audio and then synced in post. We unfortunately had some issues with it, but this had nothing to do with the ML raw recording module.
The images pretty much speak for themselves. This is way better then anything you can shoot with h.264. Many, many thanks to the whole ML team and all the contributors on the ML Forum.
We used a VAF on the shoot and didn't noticed any moire or aliasing. I did notice some vertical lines especially in the dark grey shirt. Not sure if that was from processing them in ACR or not.
It took me two days to process the footage before I could start editing, so that was a new experience. I edited in FCPX, so after I tweaked the incoming footage, I exported each sequence to ProRes 422 (HQ) then synced all the audio. As long as you use a clapper, this isn't difficult at all.
All in all, the image quality is SO much better then h.264, that I really can't go back. No matter how much more difficult it is to work with (and I'm sure it will continue to get easier) its the only way to shoot with a Canon DSLR for me at this point.
