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Using stills from EOS video
Hi there,
As a predominantly one man outfit, I’ve been looking into maximising the output of my time and am toying with the idea of issuing stills as well as film from any projects I do. I mean just filming and grabbing stills from within NLE rather than switching between stills and film on the shoot.
I wondered whether anyone had any experience of doing this, is it possible, and if so what would be the optimum settings to use (both on camera and expirt from NLE) to ensure stills would be as near to top quality as possible.
I appreciate screen grabs would probably never be as good as dedicated stills but if say just offering 5×7 prints or something with each package, would that be doable?
I’m currently using the EOS 550d and edit on FCP7 and FCP X.
Thanks in advance for any tips/advice.
Matt
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2 Replies
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The moment you put a DSLR in “video mode” you disable many of the things that make it a world class still camera.
In video mode, it becomes a video camera in the upper middle of the quality pack.
It still likely has better glass and a lot of light sensitivity – but it’s saddled with H-264 compression and an extremely cropped pixel array.
You can fire stills and interrupt your video stream, but in my experience, this results in mediocre photos, and needlessly interrupted video streams. Not excellence in each.
Trying to do two complex jobs at once is NOT a path to quality in either, IMO.
In practice, I’d recommend picking ONE mode and working in that. Anything else will split your focus and drag down your results in both.
My 2 cents, anyway.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Thanks Bill – this seems to match some other advice I’ve had off another forum so I guess you’re all right!! :0)
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