I was shooting video at a gun range the other day and realized that movie stills are pretty darn good from the 5D Mark 2. I am going to be at a pool party tomorrow and would like to get shots of my friends diving into the pool and trying to capture that perfect moment in the air. Since the stills FPS is only 3.9 vs 30 fps for video, has anyone ever tried recording video and then using the stills from the video? Or will I be happier with using burst mode and timing the shots? Thoughts?
azngigolo64 wrote:
Newbie here so please excuse the ignorance.
I was shooting video at a gun range the other day and realized that movie stills are pretty darn good from the 5D Mark 2. I am going to be at a pool party tomorrow and would like to get shots of my friends diving into the pool and trying to capture that perfect moment in the air. Since the stills FPS is only 3.9 vs 30 fps for video, has anyone ever tried recording video and then using the stills from the video? Or will I be happier with using burst mode and timing the shots? Thoughts?
The still frames from 1920x1080 5D2 video should be quite good enough for very small prints (say 5"x7"), for newspaper use, for web postings or any application where high-res is not needed. You get in effect 30 fps @ 2MP. However, the still files will be highly compressed with a lot of artifacts. These can easily break down if post processed aggressively, thus the exposure and other image parameters must be close to spot on as captured.
Here's a sample still from a video capture.
Brown Shrike (Lanius cristatus)
5D2 + Sigmonster (Sigma 300-800 DG) + Canon 2x TC, 1600 mm, 475B/3421 support, grabbed from 1920x1080 video capture, uncropped full frame, processed and resized to 1280x720
I've done burst shots on the 5D2, and it was pretty darn effective if I say so myself. <4FPS doesn't seem like it's a lot, but in your case with person after person jumping into a pool, you get good at it, and if you keep at it throughout the day, you'll get a surprising number of keepers.
I've done this with the standard "everyone jump in the air" shot, "people on water slides," "water balloon fights," and various other forms of action. Other advantages of doing it that way is you can control the shutter speed. For action, that is CRITICAL. If you want to get people frozen in air, you CANNOT do that with video, as they will be motion blurred. You'd have to shoot at a higher fps than 30, which the 5D2 is not capable of. Lastly, video will be limited to 1080p, I suppose it's debatable whether or not you need the full resolution of 5D2, but I'd rather have full resolution than not, as hey, HD space is relatively cheap.
If you want to get people frozen in air, you CANNOT do that with video, as they will be motion blurred. You'd have to shoot at a higher fps than 30, which the 5D2 is not capable of
You're confusing frame rate with shutter speed. You can easily freeze action by manually setting a high shutter speed, same as you would for a still photo. The video will look 'choppy' (think Saving Private Ryan's opening sequence) with a fast shutter speed, but it will still work.
azngigolo64 wrote:
Newbie here so please excuse the ignorance.
I was shooting video at a gun range the other day and realized that movie stills are pretty darn good from the 5D Mark 2. I am going to be at a pool party tomorrow and would like to get shots of my friends diving into the pool and trying to capture that perfect moment in the air. Since the stills FPS is only 3.9 vs 30 fps for video, has anyone ever tried recording video and then using the stills from the video? Or will I be happier with using burst mode and timing the shots? Thoughts?
okish for web I guess, the cameras don't even grab 1920x1080, it's a bit softer than that and there can be lots of compression artifacts, etc. but so long as you can frame as you wish and don't need to crop them any it might get you some pretty decent 1000-1200 across or so sized web images (so long as you don't run into moire issues with the 5D2 or have lots of details in shadow areas that you want (where the compression tends to block them to crap often))
oh you will want to bump shutter speed way up though compared to what you'd want if you were using the footage in movie form
and you shouldn't do extreme ETTR as might at times for RAW you want all the in cam settings and expsoure and everything to be done close to how the final product should look (maybe turn contrast down a bit to save some DR, but i'm not sure I'd go as flat as the cinema pic style plug ins since they are so aggressively flat they can be hard to bring back without falling apart at times IMO)
The quality is low, very low .. there is a great deal of compression taking place as can be expected at such high frame rates. But looking at video frame by frame as stills is an amazing experience .. such things as a eye blink or a fly quickly buzzing through the frame are given quite a few frames to look at.
Don't the "astro people" stack video frames as well as stills to get better resolution and decreased noise?
Seems I read about this sometime in the distant past when "researching" astro options...
