I had the amazing pleasure of working with my friend and neighbor Akin Girav to produce a fashion music video last week. Collaborating with another photographer was a great experience. We found we saw images with the same eye and we were both able to freely adapt on the fly as we discovered new ideas and built upon each others contributions to create a great finished product.
This was also my first project shooting RAW video with a Canon 5D3 equipped with Magic Lantern.
I was explaining this to another photographer yesterday and I think that when I said RAW video, he thought I meant an unedited clip. When in fact, this is the extreme opposite. RAW video in this instance captures 24, razor sharp, 1980 pixel wide RAW uncompressed still images per second, which can be fully color balanced in post and feature a broad contrast range (dynamic range) and a broad spectrum of color. Traditional videos shot with HDSLRs, like the 5D3, have a more limited dynamic range and lose color depth and sharpness when the camera compresses the video as its recorded.
Because the RAW video is uncompressed, the camera generates 64gb of data in just 12 minutes. while the cameras native compressed .h264 format would generate a 4gb file for the same length of video.
As a result the 5D3 RAW video looks very similar to actual film and as we were editing the footage I was continually blown away at the quality of the clips.
If you have a Canon HDSLR and are interested in trying this out for yourself, check out this tutorial from Cinema 5D and this post production workflow from Hunter Hampton Richards.
