By David Friedman, photojournalist & multimedia producer, msnbc.com

“The earthquake happened. Now we cannot live here. We can’t. It’s unsecure,” Ramon Crespo told the dozen Haitian orphans gathered under a tarp for a somber meeting. It was six days after the earthquake and the orphans and staff had spent those days living in a makeshift camp – in limbo – in the garden. The meeting was a pivotal moment in the tale of the orphans and the church group caring for them. It was a moment I knew I needed to shoot as video, edit, transmit and get published on our site as quickly as possible that morning.

Reporter Bill Dedman and I were embedded with members of a church group from Allentown, Penn. They headed to Port-au-Prince the day after the quake to take care of the children at the Rescue Children orphanage, which their church ran. We were staying with them and publishing daily updates on their story in blog form on news website msnbc.com.

The wrap-up piece we produced after the trip, Bill Dedman narrates.

While Bill was covering the written word, my task was to shoot and transmit both stills and video from the field daily and gather material for a comprehensive piece afterward. For the first time in my career as a multimedia producer at msnbc.com I was doing both with the same camera, a Canon 5D MkII – that’s a big deal. Trying to shoot both well on a single, developing story is always complicated, so the ability to do both with a single camera is nothing short of revolutionary.
The point in the weeklong trip when I was fully convinced of the DSLR revolution was the morning of that meeting. Mission leader Crespo told the orphans they would leave their home in two days. The church group had grown increasingly concerned for the children’s safety as the days progressed and relief had yet to reach the surrounding neighborhood. As soon as the meeting was over, I began ingesting, transcoding and editing my footage, and Bill began writing and filing a new text piece. In Avid I hurriedly threw together a natsound piece from the meeting with Crespo explaining the move to the kids, some cover shots from packing belongings, and the prayer that closed the meeting. After some minutes compressing the piece in Sorenson Squeeze down to our site video publish specs, I fired up the BGAN satellite transmitter to begin transferring the video.

Crespo tells the orphans they’re moving. Shot, edited, transmitted and published that morning.

Just after I began the BGAN upload, there was some commotion at the gate. I grabbed my camera, now somewhat stripped down into “stills” mode and went to look. A large crowd from the neighborhood had gathered to beg for food, water and electricity – supplies the orphanage couldn’t spare. I fired off a few frames while it lasted and then moved to another scene where a smaller group of woman begged for water across a barbed-wire barrier. I fired off a few more frames there before the crowd dispersed. It was a tense couple of minutes.

Women from the neighborhood around Rescue Children orphanage beg for water. (David Friedman / msnbc.com

Bill went to send an update to the story he’d already filed, and I sat back down to quickly send a couple of the stills I’d just shot. My earlier video upload was done before I’d finished ingesting my new stills and the BGAN was still connected. I captioned, toned and sent one still from each crowd scene. While those were still transmitting, I heard across the garden that the church leaders had decided to move the kids that afternoon. They were packing up and evacuating their compound and Bill and I had to pack up and go with them. The website was leading with our coverage and we were loading into vehicles to follow the kids’ journey.

In a couple of hours a lot had transpired and I got good video and stills from a single camera. Could I have done the same work with separate video and still cameras? Of course. But the transition from one camera to the other would likely have taken me longer and I might have missed shots. Add to that the need to travel light and the Canon video DSLR revolutionizes my work. Oh yeah, the video quality is beautiful too!
Now some words about our gear and workflow. We’re an Avid shop and edit in the field on laptops running Avid. PluralEyes isn’t an option for us and we can’t afford to spend time manually syncing audio to every shot. But we’re also not willing to live with Canon AGC running roughshod over our sound. So our solution is to capture audio in the camera, with a JuicedLink box, external microphone(s) and running Magic Lantern firmware to get control over levels (plus other video niceties).

Was everything perfect with my kit in Haiti? Hardly. In full “video” mode, with a Sennheiser ME-66 shotgun mounted in the camera’s hotshoe and a Zacuto Z-Finder on the LCD, I couldn’t even get my eye to the stills viewfinder. If I wanted to quickly grab a still I couldn’t. So one thing I’ll change is adding a small Sennheiser MKE-400 mic to the kit for those times when I want to dynamically switch back and forth between stills and video. I’ll give up a bit of sound quality vs. the bigger shotgun, but I can still run it through the JuicedLink and Magic Lantern (Sennheiser makes a nifty XLR adapter for it), get my eye to the stills viewfinder and get a smaller, lighter rig. Also, our 5D MkII kits were so new when the earthquake struck I didn’t have an ND filter with me – that would have been a huge help shooting video outside down there. I have one now.

All of our blog posts are here (in reverse chronological order):
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/category/1402.aspx

A slideshow of stills (also reverse chronological):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34850400/from/ET/?beginSlide=1

A playlist of the video pieces I filed while down there:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/35100898#35100898

Canon 550D / T2i production video – Zhongguancun gadget city from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Today I bought some two Canon 550D HDDSLR’s which I intend to use as a general carry around cameras and for situations where I don’t want to risk damaging a 5DmkII or 7D. It retails for around £700 in the UK and so I wasn’t expecting too much on the video front. As it turns out this little camera is a really competent performer and the footage I’ve shot so far looks pretty much the same as my 7D to my eye. As with previous cameras I thought the best way to test it would be to shoot a short film. This time I shot in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s electronics district where you can find pretty much every gadget know to man. The results speak for themselves. The footage you see here is shot at 1080p/25 frames a second and not graded with only minor adjustments of gamma, sharpening and a little smoothcam in Final Cut Pro. The sharpness, contrast and saturation were reduced in the camera by using Picture Style as I do with my other Canons. The H.264 files from the camera were converted to Apple Prores LT before editing in Final Cut Pro. I shot mainly on a Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, a Canon 35mm f1.4L lens and the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens. To get the gliding effect I used a small slider similar to a Glidetrack but sadly it was a little damaged meaning I couldn’t get it as smooth as I wanted, this may account for a slight stuttering in the image and is not a fault of the camera. The opening shots are at 1600asa and the interiors are mainly 400 and 800asa.

The Canon 550D/T2i with Zacuto Z-finder fitted

I’ve had the Canon 550D/T2i for precisely twelve hours at time of writing so these are my initial findings. It features almost identical video specification to it’s more expensive sibling, the 7D. It has 1080p at 24/25/30 fps as well as 720p 50 and 60 fps. It has a connection for an external mic via minijack but has no manual control over the input volume, same as the 7D. Instead of using compact flash cards it uses the smaller SDHC or the newer SDXC cards, I used a 16gb class 6 SDHC card with no problems for an hour today.

The camera is small but feels robust considering its size but I do find the controls a little fiddly compared to a 5DmkII or 7D. The camera does away with many of the more advanced controls of the 5DmkII and 7D for stills which mean the top plate and rear are relatively uncluttered. As with the 7D there is a dedicated video trigger button but unlike the 7D there is no rear control dial for aperture, instead you have to press a button on the back plate and then rotate the same dial you use to set shutter speed. Most of the other controls are accessed by using the menus on the rear LCD and there is a simple mode dial on the top plate that is used to select the video mode. Sadly I’ve found this dial can easily be knocked out of your chosen mode, in a similar way to the dial on the 5DmkII – I do wish Canon would fix this.

The 550D top plate

The large rear LCD is very nice indeed and has 1.04 million pixels compared to 920K on the 7D. When mated with the Zacuto Z-finder the image was easy to see and very clear, I’d go as far as to say its up there with the best I’ve seen. There is a new battery the LP-E8, sadly not compatible with the earlier cameras, which gave me at least an hour actual shooting today – pretty good going. Another key difference is the lack of the ability to dial in a precise Kelvin value for white balance, instead you have to choose one of the presets like daylight, shady, tungsten etc… or alternatively balance off a white card. The camera has a smaller range of ISO choices compared to the more expensive siblings, it has 100, 200, 400, 800 ASA etc… and misses the inbetween third stop values like 160 and 320 ASA. On the plus side it has Picture styles the same as the 7D, the ability to set Highlight tone priority in video to combat clipped highlights, and an IR trigger the same as the 7D and 5DmkII.

Rear view of the 550D showing the excellent new LCD screen

In terms of video image quality I think it is too early to make definitive judgements about quality, moire, aliasing and rolling shutter issues but I will do more testing later.

The Canon DSLR family compared - 550D, 7D, 5Dmk II and 1Dmk IV

In conclusion I think this camera is cheap enough that there is now little reason for pros who have not yet bought a HD-DSLR to not put their toes in the water and see if they like shooting video. This camera is excellent value and puts great video in the reach of many.

Intro To Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Here’s a great tutorial by Stu Maschwitz about Magic Bullet’s easy to use Mojo colour treatment software which can give your video more “Hollywood” look. I’ve been using Mojo’s sister software Magic Bullet Looks for a while now and can recommend the company. While I would personally draw the line at using this on live hard news videos, I think for some feature work it is acceptable and can really enhance the feel of a piece. Indeed, quite extreme colour grading is seen in television documentary all the time.

If you are going to use colour grading software on your DSLR please remember to dial back the in camera saturation, sharpness and contrast settings using Picture Profiles to get the best results, I would recommend you do this all the time but I know a lot of news shooters don’t as they worry more about speed. Here’s another good tutorial by a guy called Luka on the subject.

How to increase the Canon 7D dynamic range (Tutorial) from Luka on Vimeo.

Recently I’ve taken to following the blog of Hollywood director of photography Shane Hurlbut, best known for his work on Terminator Salvation and the subsiquent webisodes shot on the Canon 5DmkII. He has become one of the biggest evangelists for DSLRs in Hollywood and his thoughts generally re-enforce my views on a lot of technical stuff – but he takes it to a whole other level. Shane is shooting feature films and commercial stuff but that doesn’t mean that we in the news and documentary community can’t learn a lot from what he has to say. His recent work with the US Navy is very documentary like and has the feel I would like to try to bring to News video.

In particular he has written some great posts on camera stabilization and working onboard a nuclear sub On stabilization I think he hits the nail on the head when he says “The secret is weight and where it is placed.  This camera can be anything you want it to be.”

The Hurlblog - great place to learn some top tips

Also really interesting I found was his post entitiled the “Power of focus” which explains why super wide apertures and extreme shallow depth of focus are not always desireable and why Shane chooses to shoot at around f5.6 on a 5DmkII when there is any action. He also explains how the different sensor sizes mean that you have to shoot at f2.8 on a 7D to get the same focus feel as f5.6 on a 5DmkII. The cinematic feel of Shane’s work is a testament to the application of his theory about apertures.

Shane also recommends the use of a focus puller (person who focusses for you) but clearly this isn’t going to happen in most news environments, but given that even using a dedicated person Shane is still choosing to shoot f5.6 it follows that as a solo shooter your chances of getting accurate focus will be greatly increased by stopping down to f5.6 or greater.

I still value a fast lens, but mainly because of their light gathering ability and for stills, not the super shallow depth of focus in video. I might need to shoot f1.4 in a dark spot but would prefer to shoot f5.6 if poss. Sometimes on sit down interviews I find the interviewee can often times move too much forward and back and make even f5.6 seem too shallow to keep them acceptably sharp the whole time.

In another really good post Shane details the differences between lens brands when they are used for video. He favours other lenses such as Zeiss, Leica or older Nikon to the Canon lenses and explains his reasons why.

My collection of Zeiss ZE lenses

I’ve been buying Zeiss glass for a while now, originally the Contax fit lenses adapted to Canon and now the newer ZE lenses and can testify to how good them image they produce looks. I’ve also started buying old Leica R lenses too based on Shane’s findings.

I’d like to thank Shane for doing all this great research and testing and then sharing it with the rest of us. Please head over to his blog now and read up.

Learn Canon 5D mkII Cinematography with Philp Bloom ** Add to cart**

I was sent recently on a two week assignment to cover the Presidential elections in Sri Lanka. This trip would take me from the far south of the country to Jaffna in the extreme north.

A soldier in Northern Sri Lanka

A destroyed building in Jaffna

Sri Lanka is not the easiest place to report or shoot in. The media is controlled heavily by the government and you need permission to do just about anything.

The last time i was in Sri lanka i spent more than a week with the Tamil Tigers during the middle of the civil war in a town called Killinochi. Most of the people i met and filmed are now dead. Killinochi itself is a virtual ghost town, having almost been completely destroyed during the Sri Lankan military’s main northern assault last year.

Young girl in an IDP camp

The majority  who have suffered have been the Tamil people. Hundreds of thousands are now without a place to live or living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. For those who have left the camps they are now returning to find their houses and lively hoods have been completely destroyed by war.

Myself and correspondent Wayne Hay spent a week in Jaffna, a place that until recently had been impossible to go to. The army have controlled Jaffna for more than 10 years but it still bears the scars of more than 30 years of cival war. 98% of the population are Tamil and most of them are still living in terrible conditions with their houses either having been destroyed or been taken over by the military. Such is the level of censorship over the media that we were removed from Jaffna on the morning of the elections. At 4am in the morning four large explosions rocked the windows of the guest house we were staying in. The government had complained about a few of the stories we had done in the north of the country and had sent the military around to demand that we left and to escort us more than 200km away. We were not allowed to film any election activity that took place in the north of the country. Only 17% of voters turned out to vote in the north according to government figures. Were they intimidated? Were they free and fare? Who knows….with no media allowed to report in the area the outside world would just have to assume they were.

Sri Lanka Tamils from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

I created this small short film of Tamils praying in a Hindu temple using my 7D. It was quite dark and very early in the morning meaning it was too difficult to shoot with my broadcast camera. The camera worked well for this situation. I would of liked to have used it more on my trip but due to time constraints and remote filing of stories using a BGAN satphone it was not possible. I hope in the future that conversion times and ease of use will improve on DSLR cameras as i love the images they produce and would use them a lot more. Still for most news gathering events such as this trip the broadcast cameras convenience and quick turn around time meant i had to use it on 90% of occasions. Aljazeera’s response to me using a DSLR continues to be fantastic and i am now blogging about it on the Aljazeera website. They will continue to post not only the stories but short films i shoot in various countries. I commend them on their forward thinking and hope other news networks jump on board the DSLR revolution.

This same film will be running on the Aljazeera website shortly. Here are some of the other stories that ran on Aljazeera from Sri Lanka:

My article on using DSLR cameras to shoot the news is also running on the Aljazeera website. Click this link