Canon Crank Cameras
Posted by Travis on May 4, 2008
No, not hand crank cameras but cameras used in filming the movie Crank 2. I have discovered on a couple different websites that a big budget Hollywood film is being done on budget gear. Somewhat of a church budget MAYBE.
The cameras in discussion are Canon XH A1 “consumer” grade HD units. These things sell all over now for around $3000 plus accessories. I just thought it was nice to know that you can get high quality footage (good enough for charging a hefty admission even, haha) at a relatively affordable price. We have two very nice non-HD cameras at church that we paid more than that for in the past three years.
A buddy of mine, Mike, was using one to film some live performance footage of another buddy, David, last night. He digs the camera. Anyone else use one of these? These will have to get bumped to the top of my wish list for production gear… maybe next year.
[...] cameras in discussion are Canon XH A1 “consumer” grade HD units. These things sell [. … MORE >>Creadit By weight [...]
Thanks for the mention, Travis. A lot of pros and hobbyists alike swear by this one (along with its bigger brother, the XL-H1). The image is stunning and Canon of course always makes great lenses.
Just a few regrets I have about this particular camcorder. Quite big regrets, actually, but there are easy workarounds. The first and least avoidable is the HDV compression. I’ve never actually seen uncompressed HD from one of these, but I know that the color sampling from HDV is icky any way. At the moment, there is no way to capture uncompressed from the A1 (well, there is, in theory, but you’d have to go component out into a capture card in your G5 and use Apple ProRes or some other 4:2:2 codec - not very practical to say the least). You’d have to fork over an extra $3,000 for the XH-G1 or the the XL-H1, both of which have HD-SDI out for uncompressed live capture stream. Also, they both have Genlock and Timecode in, some connections you might find worth the extra three grand for live video in church or at the GP or what not. If you’re not picky about the compression artifacts and if you know you’ll end up only downconverting anyway (and since most viewers will never notice), then the A1 is not a bad choice. I don’t understand why they would use it for a feature film, but I’d like to see how it turns out for them.
The other regret is the “Frame” mode. Canon calls it 24F, not 24p. It took me a while to find this out, but it doesn’t record the same way the DVX or any other 24p camera does. The end result is the same in the NLE - you get a 23.976 fps timeline just like you would with DVX footage. But the trick is getting it into the NLE. As it stands, FCP 6 is the only one to support 24F capture natively. Premiere Pro requires a codec from the Adobe website (I use it, works perfectly). And Avid… you can forget it, I’ve been trying forever to find a work around for it. The problem is that there is no standard 2:3 pulldown added to it. Instead, it’s some weird cadence that only the Canon camcorder itself knows. So as you would expect, no other deck supports it. You have to use your camcorder to capture. Not a big deal. But not very flexible. The end look is still very organic. As I understand it, a lot of DVX users (who swore by it b/c of the 24p) have made the switch to the XH-A1 for that reason.
The only other thing is that there is a consumer grade camcorder Canon makes called the HV20. A lot of users buy it as a playback deck because it will read “Frame” mode. But the amazing thing about it is it shoots true 1920 x 1080 24p. No frame mode crap and better HDV compression. And about $2,500 cheaper. Beats me why they couldn’t do that with their prosumer camcorder.
Enough ranting, I will be looking forward to seeing some Crank 2 footage.
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