5D Mark 2 or 6D

[milandirector]

Hi,

 

I would like to get back up camera (and also a nice stills cam) and unfortunately I do to have finances for 5d mark 3, so I will go either with mark 2 or 6d. Which one is better for video, and could I try shooting RAW on either of these. I know that Magic Lantern is in very progressive stage in regards to Mark 3 but I didn't follow if there are possibilities on Mark 2 or 6D.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts and comments.

[Germy1979]

It's the oldest, but I've had both. I'd take the Mark 2 over the 6D any day. I still love the image it puts out for video straight out of the box, and yes it does do Raw with ML. It uses CF cards also so the resolution should be higher. Both have a VAF mosaic anti aliasing filter available.

[milandirector]

Thanks Germy

[Germy1979]

No prob:). Anybody will bring up Act of Valor for being a big Hollywood flick, but they used Modded Panavision lenses we'll never afford with top notch post production.. Kind of irrelevant to the average shooter, lol.. But check out videos like "Postcard from Bali" on Vimeo. That was shot 90% with the old Canon 50mm 1.4, and it is absolutely beautiful despite the limitations. It has a rich character to it that did "not" carry over to the Mark 3 that's for sure. Of course raw is a different subject... But if I were in a situation where I didn't want to shoot raw because I wanted to preserve space, I'd still prefer the Mark 2's internal image with a VAF filter over the Mark 3's. This is all of course, personal preference:).

[milandirector]

Thanks a lot for your advice. If there is anyone who could help me out with shooting RAW on 5D M2. There is a lot of stuff including Andrew's guide for shooting on M3, however if anyone could help me out about M2 and RAW I would be very grateful. 

[dhessel]

First get a 1000x card, just because a card says it is 90 MB/s second that doesn't mean that it is for writing and that you will get anywhere near that speed. Only a 1000x card will allow you to max out the write speed on the 5D, as far as I have seen. I have notices most cards record raw at around half of their advertised speed.

 

Next check out the first topic here, this is for a special ML build just for the 5D2. It is the same as the official builds with a few extra features. Download the latest build from the link at the top and the alpha_one build near the bottom. Read the pdf and then copy the contents of alpha_one to the card, next copy and replace any files already on the card with the ones from the latest build.

 

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=5533.0

 

you will also want to check out the users guide for installing and using ML in general. You will want to familiarize yourself with ML before jumping into raw. There are lots of useful features which are good to learn about anyway.

 

Once ML is installed go to the modules menu, it now looks like 4 squares and is near the left side of the ML menu. Enable raw_rec and file_man.

 

You could use mlv_rec which records to the new ML video format MLV. This format has more features but is slower to write so is more useful if you have a 5D3, the 5D2 cannot do full HD continuous as it is so the performance loss is not worth it at this point. The 5D2 has a max write rate of around 75 MB/s were the 5D3 is getting closer to 110 MB/s with card spanning.

 

Turn of and on the camera, then go to the ML menu video tab and enable raw video, enter the raw video sub menu and choose your aspect ratio and horizontal width. Once done the menu will display the approximate write speed needed for continuous recording. 

 

With the live view on you will now have a white rectangle showing you the area that will be recorded. Now you can simply press the record button as normal and recording will begin. The display will tell you your recording data rate and how many frames you can expect to get before stopping/skipping frames. Stop as normal or the recording may stop if the camera's buffer fills up. At this point there is no way of knowing how much memory you have left while recording, the raw recording will start freaking out if you run out of memory. This can corrupt recordings to which there are some fixes for. So far I have not had any corrupt recordings from running out of memory in the last few builds.

 

Once done you can preview the last clip using the playback option in the raw video sub menu, you can also go to the debug tab and use the file manager to delete/review your raw files. You will need a external card reader to transfer the raw files over to the computer, using the camera with a usb will not work. 

 

If any of your recordings were larger than 4GB then the recording gets split into multiple files. This will show like .RAW, .R00, .R01, etc... These files need to be merged together before the can be process further, again look to the link posted above.

 

Once the raw files are ready you can use the raw2dng to extract a sequence of dng's from each raw file. This can be done using the cmd/terminal or using some of the GUI programs listed in the raw post processing forum. I cannot be much help with those since I just use a custom python script I wrote.

 

Once done the dng's can be edited using adobe software and with resolve. As of  resolve version 10 you can bring in the dng's directly and these can be regular dng's now. They no longer need to be cDng's converted with the raw2cdng converter. That is really nice because there are still quite a few issues with the raw2cdng app. Also adobe premiere has added native dng support but I hear is got issues. Dng's work great is after effects as well. 

 

Lastly spend some time and read over the forum there is a ton of info in there and you don't want to be another noob that jumps in there requesting a feature or asking a question that has been asked and answered many times before. This seems like a daily occurrence and the users over there are getting tired of it. 

 

Good luck.

[ntblowz]

6D got stuck with slow SD controller (40mb max), so for shooting raw it can't shoot as long or high res as the 5D Mark II (gets to 80mb I think)

[JeremyDulac]

You can get a Canon 6d right now for roughly $1800 on ebay (though i got mine reburbished like new for a steal of $1400) and you can get the Mosaic VAF filter for $365..So for about $2200 you can be on the level of the 5d 3 minus RAW. That VAF really does kill moire. The 6d is a gorgeous camera and has an amazing picture easily as good as a 5d 3 out of the box. And once they get that RAW worked out through Magic Lantern, it'll be a beast! A few reviews even say it has better low light/high iso capability than the 5d 3. I understand there is no headphone jack and some other small issues (in my opinion)..but to each his own i guess.