Adventures in Stock Video Footage
I recently bought the Canon 5D Mark ii with the 24 – 105mm lens – fantastic camera for travel and stock photography, but also one of the first digital SLRs to record full screen HDTV movies with sound. To try it out, I have filmed a few swimming pool scenes and joined a new stock site – Pond5 – to see how the business works.
The Canon is pretty easy to operate in video mode, but a major initial step is to make sure that you have the latest firmware. Canon issued a new firmware release in June 2009 for the 5D that has a major advance in video production – the ability to manually set the aperture and shutter speed. The earlier firmware automatically adjusted these which removed a lot of control of depth of field in particular. The firmware is pretty easy to handle – download from the Canon site, load onto a compact flash and use existing menu commands to update the firmware – a 5 minute task. The other key things to do is to use a tripod. Video is very sensitive to movement and a handheld camera simply results in jerky and unprofessional video – use a solid tripod, and, if possible, a fluid head to allow smooth movements if you are panning across the scene.
I approached the filming by positioning my tripod and deciding what the key element of the scene would be. Most stock footage is between 7 and 20 seconds, and so the focal point must be clear. In my trials I used a pool waterfall and focused clearly on it at maximum zoom. Autofocus doesn’t work in video, and so an approach is to use autofocus when zoomed in and then turn off autofocus – the focus will stay where it is, and you can zoom out to the required composition. I also turned off the stabilization system as that isn’t helpful on a tripod. Then, in manual exposure mode, adjust the ISO, shutter speed and aperture to get the exposure correctly set. Use a higher shutter speed for moving objects, just as you would with a photograph. Then adjust the aperture so that the exposure is shown as correct in the viewfinder. Finally, move to live view, and start the video using the “Select” button. Be careful with any movements as they need to be very smooth, and avoid big changes in the distance of objects to the camera as it is set to manual focus at this stage.
Pond5 is easy on video formats with the Canon – they accept footage straight from the camera in MOV format. Other sites require encoding of the video, which I will cover in a different post. The trick now is to see if they sell!
Check out the video in my collection here: Pond5 Stock Video Collection
