I’m back in Beijing after my travels and I’ve finally had a chance to get out and shoot a piece for my newspaper’s website with the 1DmkIV. It’s nothing too complicated but a good excuse to put the camera through its paces in bright daylight. I set it in 720p/60, put a 70-200 lens on it and ventured down to a frozen lake in Beijing to see how it performed in daylight.
1DmkIV and 7D on Ice – Winter fun on Beijing’s Houhai lake from Dan Chung on Vimeo.
When it came to editing the 1DmkIV footage was changed into slow motion by using Apple’s Cinematools to conform it to 25p. All the footage is graded using Magic Bullet looks.
To get the moving shots I attached my 7D on the front of an ice-bike that I’d rented, using a super clamp. The camera was fitted with a Tokina 11-16mm lens and to get the exposure I wanted I fitted a Genus Fader ND filter to the front. I would have put the 1DmkIV on there but I didn’t really want to be the first person to write one off; imagine how embarrassing that would be. I got some strange looks as it was – and had some near misses.
This camera was set to shoot 1080p/30 and then conformed to 25p to give a very slight slowdown, then downsized to 720p in the final output.
Sadly the ice was not as smooth as I’d expected and ideally I should have used some kind of stabilisation rig for the 7D. So the result was not perfect and needed a little help from Final Cut’s smoothcam filter to get rid of some of the worst wobbling. I guess a better solution might have been a gyro stabilizer and some kind of arm, but I have neither. Maybe I’ll treat myself later in the year.
