This weekend my faithful and trusted former student and fellow videographer Jimmy Freeman used the Canon 7D to shoot a speaker for Virginia McCarthy's forthcoming documentary. The shoots allowed us to really test the 7D's ability to do live event recording. Here's what happened.
Jimmy used the 7D as a "B-Cam" to shoot several speakers at a church in San Francisco. The speakers in total spoke for over an hour. To record their audio the 7D was patched into its 1/4" mic plug from a mixer which was receiving mic audio from the microphone where the speakers spoke from. Right off the bat, the frustrating thing about the 7D is the lack of real audio control. There's no headphone jack to confirm it's receiving signal, and there's no level indicators to monitor how low or high your signal is recording. You're virtually left to a guessing game estimation or recording a little bit of footage and then playing it back to see if it recorded audio.
Once audio was done being troubleshooted, Jimmy began shooting the speakers and ran into the next issue with the 7D. The manual states the longest any single shot can be is 29min 59secs or 4GB, whichever comes first. Therefore, Jimmy had to stop the recording every 29mins even though he had 16GB compact flash cards. The other issue is since there's only one card slot, to swap out a full card he lost whatever was happening. Again, since he was shooting the "B-cam" footage this wasn't too big an issue, but a noteworthy one nonetheless.
The next morning when Jimmy set about capturing the footage, he ran into a major snag. The movie files were not being recognized by his Mac and we both suspected the large file size had something to do with it. After doing some internet research, Jimmy discovered the 7D apparently suffers from overheating issues when recording long shots. Well this may have been news to both of us, but it didn't help the fact we still had several 29 minute shots we needed downloaded.
Luckily, Jimmy still had two more 16GB cards to record the next event and this time he limited his shots to no more than five minutes in length. This definitely did the trick in terms of being able to download the footage with no problems. However, I'm still yet to get the original shoot's footage off (mostly because I've been too sick to try). But Jimmy was able to start getting some of the original long footage off by using the camera's built-in clip editor to shorten the shots into smaller parts. He also installed the Canon software that came with the camera, which also allowed him to pull off some more footage. I plan to do a combination of these two solutions and I'll write about my progress in next week's article.
Well after this ordeal, it's obvious the 7D is not meant to do live events. This camera would still be a great "B" camera to do an event with, so long as it's clear to everyone the footage will be nothing more than "cut away" footage. If you need a 2nd camera to sync up with your main unit, the 7D is NOT for you when it comes to a live event.
Stay tuned for more experiments with the 7D as well as more results from our future head to head dual with the Sony EX-1.
Forward!
-Gustavo
This blog will document Gustavo Guardado's first feature film directorial endeavor. It hopes to also teach other young up and coming filmmakers how to do it themselves. The blog will also serve to offer news about any other Opificer Media productions in the works.
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