Dslrnewsshooter.com joined with F-stop academy’s Den Lennie to bring you this brief hands on video with the sparkly new Canon EOS-1D Mk IV.
Brian Worley is Project manager – Photo Education and Canon Europe and we were very lucky to get time with him and the 1D Mk IV, we talked to him about the camera and it’s video functions. We also had a good play with the camera ourselves.
Den and I were able to see that the high ISO performance is definitely improved over the 5DmkII – as Vincent Laforet has already ably demonstrated with his film ‘Nocturne’. The rear LCD screen also seemed to give a much nicer image than the previous Canons, working really well with the Zacuto Z-finder I test with it. The activation of video shooting using the FEL button by the shutter button seemed quite intuitive for news shooters trying to get video clips in between stills. The build quality is as expected with a 1 series body – which is to say better than on the 5DmkII and 7D, it feels solid. It shoots all the same resolutions and video sizes as the 7D so basically it does PAL friendly 1080P/25 along with 24P and 30P plus 720P 50 and 60fps so for news its pretty adaptable to your workflow. I’m glad Canon recognised the importance of 25p and 50p PAL rates as like many other newspaper video people I often have to cut Reuters or AP video PAL footage into my finished films, messing around with multiple frame rates on a timeline can be a real pain. The 1.3x crop remains from the previous 1D Mk III – I’d have preferred full frame – but many will not see this as a disadvantage.
We also tested the camera with a couple of video support rigs from Redrockmicro and Zacuto along with a Genus mattebox and bars setup, all worked fine. I was worried the extra weight of the camera compared to the 5DmkII would make these lightweight rigs less usable but actually found that if anything it actually improved handling – with short lenses at least. Audio is the main area where there has been little change, with the minijack mic input still being limited to automatic gain control – we didn’t have time to test any audio adapters like the Beachtek or Juicedlink but I have no reason to think they function any differently to the way they do with the 5DmkII.
This camera rounds out Canon’s video capable D-SLR range, users of pro 1-series bodies can now choose to do the same other Canon users, there is no excuse not to give video a go. I think that with Canon and Nikon now offering video in their top end pro cameras there are very interesting times ahead for the news industry – convergence between video and stills is now technically possible for many assignments, the question is whether the likes Reuters, The Associated Press, Getty Images and the larger newspaper groups will choose to move it forward.
A big thank you to Den and F-Stop academy for shooting this video with me and editing it – he’s a top guy and I’d recommend you to drop by his site. I hope we can do more with him in the future. Thanks also to Felix Clay for helping out during the shoot.
