Advice needed shooting video on 5D MKII

Deano

Deano

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Right I am trying to put together a basic dvd on my 5D MKII for a University project. I have a fast enough CF Card (Sandisk 8gb Extreme IV 45MB/s) and an external mic to improve sound quality. I will be importing them onto my Mac which has iMovie already installed. My questions are as follows:

a) Will iMovie be sufficient to do basic editing? If not, what do you recommend?

b) I have been told that the videos once imported from the 5D will need converting...Is this true? Apparently the movie recording on a 7D is different from the 5D and does not need converting

c) Once I do eventually have a movie saved on my Mac to burn onto a dvd disc. What type of dvd disc do I use?

Any advice is very much appreciated and i apologise in advance if any of these questions seem stupid...:thumbs:
 
5d2 records in .mov so it should be fine for Mac as it is quickTime format :)
 
iMovie is perfectly adequate as a video editor. I find though that Dvd's burned from the previous version iMovie 6 are better quality. It's got something to do with the the encoding quality. You should be abe to download the previous version for free from Apple. I use DVD-R on mine although you could also use DVD+R. Personally I don't like RW discs. Don't let the Mac burn at max speed. Sometimes the buffering can't cope !
 
Yes I'm running Snow Leopard with iLife '09. Been through Google but struggling to find iMovie 6 download.
Thanks for the info though its been really helpful.
 
Seems Apple no longer allow downloads of iMovie6 from their site.
I'd be tempted to try and find a copy of iLife6 and install from that. if the final playback quality is secondary to the content you may be able to use iMovie9. Try it and see for yourself before you go any further.
 
Does anybody have any idea what format i need to be working with? When i open up final cut and go to 'easy set-up' just below the 'format' menu there is the 'use' drop down bar where upon you select from a large menu such as DV-Pal 32 etc....There are a lot of choices here so does anybody know which i need to select when using footage imported from my 5D, so that i do not have to keep rendering it.
 
You will always have to render your work if you want to put it on DVD.
 
Yes but once a clip is imported into final cut, if the correct selection is made from that drop down menu (ie: DV-Pal 32 when importing from a Sony handycam) when the clips are pulled into the bar below they will play straight away without the need to render each and every one.
 
Thats because a Sony handycam is most probably using Mini DV tapes and the files are recorded in a different format. Video from a 5DII is a quick time file (.mov) using the H264 codec and that requires more processing. HD video is much harder to work with than SD especially when its from a 5DII or a AVCHD camcorder.
 
Aaah right ok. Sorry if i seem a bit simple its just that this video stuff is all new to me. Just out of interest, what selection should I make from the drop down menu or will it not make a difference?
 
the big reason why you have to keep rendering it is because footage shot straight out of the camera is compressed and hard to work with. The best thing to do is to convert it to Apple Prores codec. It will balloon in size when you do this so make sure you have lots of space but the converted footage will then not need to be rendered every time you want to watch parts in final cut.

If you have compressor it will do this relatively quickly.

When you create your sequence it depends on the frame rate you have recorded at. I always use 1920x1080 HDTV 1080i(16:9) at 23.98 frame rate because I shoot at 24fps.

When you render for burning to your dvd make sure you export as mpeg2 because this is the format that dvd is looking for, otherwise you will have to re-render it when you burn the dvd and this means twice the rendering and losss of quality. Not sure if the DVD burner in iLife can handle mpeg2 though. I use DVD studio pro.
 
Okat to make things easier I am going to record in 640x480 instead of full HD. Will this make burning the final version onto dvd any easier?
 
Deano said:
Okat to make things easier I am going to record in 640x480 instead of full HD. Will this make burning the final version onto dvd any easier?
Click to expand...

The only difference will be that your video will take up less space when you transfer it to your computer and it will be poorer quality.
 
Deano said:
Okat to make things easier I am going to record in 640x480 instead of full HD. Will this make burning the final version onto dvd any easier?
Click to expand...

It will put less strain on your computer, but you have to bear in mind that you are converting from a lossy compressed video format (Quicktime) to another lossy compressed format that is used for DVD (mpeg2). The higher resolution the original video, the more loss it can take before you will see IQ degradation.

Get yourself a DVD RW to experiment on. You can burn to it to try and see, then when you are happy you can burn to a +/- R.
 
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