I recently purchased a Canon 6D to complement my Canon 7D. Like many people I was weighing which DSLR body to buy for an upgrade.
There aren’t whole a lot of people doing professional video in Worcester, Massachusetts (more are in Boston) so I thought I’d throw some ideas and advice out there from my own experience.
For me personally, for Parallax Pictures, I’m thinking exclusively about video. These cameras are more or less identical to me when it comes to photography: if I need to print an enormous banner for a client I’d shoot medium format anyway, I wouldn’t use the 5D family. For product and studio photography there’s always enough light since we control it, and with fast lenses ISO/noise issues usually aren’t a problem even for candids. The 7D runs at about 18MP and the 5DMKII about 21MP so there’s not a tremendous difference unless you’re doing big prints (which I rarely do, since I focus on video).
For video the 5D Mark II and Mark III are great, but I think the 6D has them beat. Mainly because it’s essentially the same thing as the Mark III but almost $2,000 cheaper.
The Mark III would be well worth the money if it was able to natively shoot uncompressed video (e.g. ProRes 422) or full HD 60fps (instead of 720p), or if it had an XLR input to remove syncing from the post workflow. But it can’t do any of those things. None of the improvements they made over the Mark II were particularly interesting to me as a videographer/filmmaker, though they did boost the ISO capabilities and that’s always nice.
As it stands, the 6D is full-frame just like the Mark III, has pretty much all the same video features, takes all the same lenses and even has a sensor that’s nearly the same size.
The nice thing about having a full-frame camera and an APS-C camera is that you effectively double the number of lenses you have. You have all your focal lengths full-frame, plus all of them times 1.6. For me this has tremendous hidden value and adds a lot of versatility to my setup.
For video production more so than photo it’s essential to have multiple angles, especially for live events. This is another reason I wanted a new camera. For editing it’s extremely important- you need to be able to shrink and expand scenes or interviews and give the illusion of continuity, otherwise you’re stuck doing tacky fades or jump cuts.
But don’t take my word for it, try them yourself, read about the specs and see what you think.
Hope you enjoyed this break from video marketing, back to the usual Parallax topics for our next post!