To most visitors, Hong Kong it is just a shopping and restaurant bonanza with high fashion names on every street corner and food outlets everywhere. There are approximately 7 million of us packed into a small area with most of us living in high-rise building. To most people our backyards are the streets below where we live. To me 50% of Hong Kong land mass is My Backyard.

Unbeknown to most, just less than 50% of Hong Kong is a Country Park and to me this is where I work and spend most of my free time. Over the past 15 years the majority of my filming has been in these parks.

Sai Kung – The Lost Horizon from jingbar on Vimeo.

It is no easy task as the temperature and humidity in summer is extremely high. Summer temperatures reach mid 30’s C with humidity in high 90’s. This makes carrying a Betacam camera, Anton Bauer brick batteries, tripod and most importantly water and lunch a real burden. The parks are crossed by many hiking trails ranging from the longest, the McLehose Trail of 100km and the Wilson Trail and just behind the airport, the Lantau Trail. Over the years we have worked out that 3 people is the optimum, one carrying the tripod on a specially modified backpack frame as well as lunch, one carrying the water, she is the luckiest as the weight decreases as the day goes on and I am the one carrying the Betacam camera, lens, matte box and 2 Anton Bauer bricks together with time-lapse controller and hand held automatic radio time code logger, all packed tightly into a portabrace large backpack. The logger is a key part of the gear as our videos rely on using footage that we may have shot years ago (Country Parks rarely change in outlook over time). This logger grabs the time code, time and date every time we roll the camera, it is downloaded into excel and can be sorted and imported into FCP for easy digitizing. We now have 30 – 40,000 entries in excel.

Only once have we not reached our destination but we decided to abort the trip as we all were starting to be affected by heatstroke and it was decided it better to rest under a tree than later have to call out the emergency services. Normally our lunch location is determined by where we think we can shoot a good time lapse so the camera doesn’t get a break it just keeps on filming while we eat.

Jump forward now to 2009, what joy it was when Canon released their Canon 5D Mark 2, here we have what we have been dreaming about for years, a lightweight High Definition camera. The 5DM2 camera with batteries weighs less than one of our former brick batteries. Now tripod can be lighter, we still can do time-lapse, spare “tapes” are now small CF cards. Matte box has been a problem until friends at Genus have said they would make a prototype of the clamp on mattebox that could use my 4×5.65 graduated filters – Thanks.

All the crew is happy now, I have all my gear in a small backpack, and the only person complaining is the “water girl” she still starts off the day with the same weight as before.

As to logging, currently I am using Expression Media it is easy to use and grabs a thumbnail of each shot.

As a side note my hobby is bird photography, I can now get my trusty Canon 400mm f5.6 lens into the pack and shoot stills with the same camera – Thanks Canon for coming out with a great tool which now allows me to be more creative in my ultimate aim of creating Visitor Centre videos that will wow their audiences.

And now they have released the Canon 7D and I had thought I had reached my ultimate with the 5DM2, what will 2010 bring – I know what somebody hopes “lightweight water”

Canon 7D Test from jingbar on Vimeo.

Ungraded 7D test footage by Bob Thompson using a 50mm f1.8 at 1250 ISO

5DmkII video – Re-enacting the making of Mao’s China from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

This is the latest video I’ve finished for the Guardian website. As per usual it is shot on a 5DmkII, but has a few cut away long shots by my assistant using the super little JVC HM-100 camcorder. As this was a live show and not set up especially for me I had to keep the rig mobile while running the camera was mounted on a small custom Redrockmicro rig with a Zacuto Z-finder 2 and a Fader ND filter for exposure control. A high shutter speed was chosen to try and get that ‘Saving Private Ryan effect’. Also in this case the depth of field was moderate, shooting about f5.6 of f8 most of the time so I was using the 5DmkII instead of a handycam mainly for its size, weight and wide angle lens coverage rather than shallow depth of field look.

In the action sequences the rolling shutter effect is clearly visible. This effect is demonstrated here by f-stop academy supremo Phil Bloom.

7d 5dmkII noise and rolling shutter rough test from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

So my question is this, for news shooting does the audience really care that there is a bit of rolling shutter? this is not a feature film or a drama and so the audience expectation of quality is lower, they are used to seeing camera phone footage and bad DV on the news these days anyway. If I were shooting a feature like Slumdog Millionaire this would clearly be unacceptable, but I’m not.

I like many others complain about this a lot to the likes of Canon and Nikon, but the reality is for the type of work I am doing I don’t think the viewer cares. Your thoughts please?

Matt Jasper, a cameraman for the UK’s Channel 4 news, picked up his Canon Eos7D this weekend and promptly rigged it up with some cool toys so he can use it for ENG. He’s planning to blog here about the experience of changing from a big, heavy ENG camera to a 7D rig, stay tuned. Here’s a quick video we did as his first instalment.

Products from Canon, Redrockmicro, Genus, Zacuto, Zoom, Sony and Pinknoise systems.

Canon 7D – TV cameraman Matt Jasper unboxes and rigs up his new 7D from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

You can see more about Matt and his work covering the Chinese earthquake on the Channel 4 news website here

Participants in the Hangzhou Yang Xiaoguang Canon workshop experiment with the Canon 5DmkII

Any international visitor to a Chinese photography festival should come prepared with the best the camera market has to offer, as anything less will leave you feeling markedly underdressed. At the meeting of newspaper photographers in Dali this year it was the turn of the Canon 5DmkII, a camera that has taken the Chinese news industry by storm as newspapers introduce multimedia onto their websites. One Canon rep told me they were selling around 2,000 units a month in China, and I have heard rumours of double this number in peak months.

The Southern Metropolitan News in Guangzhou, like many of the 2,200 national and provincial newspapers in China, has invested heavily in the 5DmkII. They now have 12 photographers shooting both stills and video as well as a dedicated multimedia team working on longer term projects (see http://umedia.nddaily.com/#20090912-12 and click around). Technically the stories are well produced but creating compelling narratives is proving much harder. However The Southern Metropolitan is making progress and has invited Mediastorm founder Brian Storm twice now to run workshops with their staff which has made a noticeable difference.

Canon too has not missed the opportunity, offering free workshops and supporting a new £5,000 multimedia award for young Chinese photojournalists. Most newspapers have a mix of Canon and Nikon equipment making it much easier for them to buy into whichever camera system offers them the best product. Canon China have put aside twenty-four 5DmkIIs along with lenses, sound equipment and computers exclusively for training news photographers around the country and the results are starting to come through.

The video below (without the Chinese subtitles) was shot this summer by Changsha photographer Liu Zhe, who attended the first 5D workshop in April.

This is the best video I have seen by a Chinese newspaper photographer to date and there is still plenty of room for improvement, however given the Chinese newspaper market is yet to see the kinds of revenue drops now being experienced in the West, there is no doubt in my mind that we will see far greater investment in this kind of reporting in China over the next few years.

D J Clark is director of Visual Journalism at the Asia Center for Journalism and course leader for the University of Bolton – MA Photography (international photojournalism, travel and documentary) that runs in Dalian China.

Click here to view the the 1080p version. Sorry its taken so long but I’ve been having a few upload problems.

It was exported at full res 1080p from Final Cut Pro then recompressed using Mpegstreamclip at about 65% quality.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the audio cable I use between my Eos7D and my ZoomH4n or Sony PCM-D50 audio recorders. It’s not as some have suggested just a 3.5mm jack to jack cable, but instead features a -25db PAD, it is essentially a carefully made cable with a resistor that attenuates the output. This reduces the output volume of the audio recorder to a more friendly mic level input that the 5DmkII or 7D can cope with. I had it specially made by John McCombie at Pinknoise systems in the UK, he specialises in audio bits and bobs. You can contact him at pinknoise1@gmail.com

Warning, it does NOT defeat the cameras in built AGC but it does give as good as the standard camera can give without using a hack like Magiclantern for 5DmkII from Tramm Hudson. You can of course record on the recorder as well and use the cable to provide a nice clean guide track for later syncing in your editing software. The amazing Pluraleyes software for Final Cut can of course be used to automate this.

Another thing, the Zoom H4n shares its line out with the headphone socket so there is no way to monitor with headphones when using this cable. Maybe someone can make a suitable y-splitter cable. The alternative is to use a recorder like the Sony PCM-D50 with its separate line out and headphones jacks, with this combo you can monitor too. Sadly the Sony does not have XLR sockets, seems you can’t have it all.

Dan

Canon 7D movie – Another night in Beijing from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

So here is my first attempt at filming with a production Canon Eos7D just one hour after receiving it from my local camera store. Starting at 10pm I spent about 2 hours in total filming this in the Nanluoguxiang Hutong in Beijing, mostly at around 1600 to 6400 ISO. At first I had a few problems re-adjusting my head to the different button layout to the 5DmkII but by the end of the shoot I was getting used to it. The camera feels great in the hand and I get round to doing more testing and analysis later. For now I’m happy that it is producing the kind of results I want and at 25p, all ready for broadcast. For the news shooter this is the last major hurdle to proper production, there are other issues like sound and aliasing, but this was the big one and so we can rejoice. Several of my broadcast TV collegues are now interested in using these cameras for news coverage.

In my unscientific gut feeling test I think the images from the 7D in low light are slightly noiser than the 5DmkII but still amazing considering Beijing’s dark streets and dim lighting. Its a shame this isn’t a full-frame sensor, but its not a deal breaker for me.

Picture style was set at neutral and the whole thing was edited in Final Cut Pro with no colour correction, the reduced from 1080p to 720p in MPEG streamclip with just a slight contrast and saturation tweak. I’ll try and make the 1080p version available soon on Smugmug.

Lenses were the Canon 50mm f1.2L, 35mm f1.4L and the 70-200mm f4L IS. I shot mainly handheld attaching my Zacuto Z-finder straight to the camera, then added a prototype of the new Genus d-slr bars supporting their wide angle mattebox to prevent any excess lens flare. I also shot using a small Redrockmicro shoulder rig at times as well as on my fantastic Miller DS-20 tripod. Audio was from a Zoom H4n feeding the camera audio directly using a custom cable from Pinknoise systems (living with AGC to speed time in the edit).

When I shot the my original ‘One night in Beijing’ test reel on the Eos5DmkII ten months ago I new the whole video game had changed irreversibly. The 7D is the next logical evolution of the 5DmkII video capabilities, apart from the lack of a full frame sensor and the resulting low image noise, it does all things just that little bit better.

Canon EOS5DmkII, One night in Beijing. from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

My original 5DmkII movie also shot on the day of its shipping.

Just attaching the Z-finder to the 7D. I want to give at least 30mins to set, wish I could give it the full 24 hours but I’m too in a rush to shoot something.

So here is my new site which at the moment contains nothing apart from these photos of my shiny new Canon Eos7D. I hope to make this a resource for all news and documentary shooters using DSLRs to make HD video. Please check back here soon.