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People who use cameras like the Canon 1DX are usually shooting fast-action sequences like sports and nature subjects. The hallmark feature at play is the ability to fire off stills ridiculously fast—12 fps RAW, or 14 fps JPEG.
Then we started thinking—14 frames per second. That’s so fast, it’s damn near movie-like. In fact, many of the Super 8 film cameras of yore shot only a bit faster at 18 fps. So why not use 1DX bursts as a movie camera? It was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
To compare, the the 1D Mark IV shoots 10 fps, and the 7D shoots 8 fps. On the Nikon side, their flagship D4 shoots 11 fps.
You’re probably thinking why bother stitching stills together when the 1DX has a movie mode that shoots at 24, 30, even 60 fps. Why not just use that? Yes, the 1DX, as well as most DSLRs these days, can shoot amazing video at standard frame rates. But if you cobble together a video from stills, you are getting the a full 18 megapixels in each frame (in video resolution parlance, that’s 5K video! ), rather than the scaled down 1080p footage (about 2 megapixels).
Our resulting videos were super detailed and crisp. Actually, viewing them on a regular HDTV or monitor won’t do them justice, and until a 4K monitor hits our doorstep, we won’t even get to see them play at full size.
Of course, there are vast limitations to using the 1DX’s still mode to make movies. Aside from settling for a choppy 14 fps, you can only shoot in bursts of between 5-10 seconds (this might increase with faster CF cards), there is no sound recorded, and you can’t even see through the viewfinder while shooting.
But for all the downsides, it was surprisingly, incredibly fun shooting in this manner. It felt like shooting with an old 16mm Bolex camera. That loud shutter, the short bursts, composing your shot through a viewfinder rather than an LCD, it was quite a joy. All in all, we had to shoot 2000 separate JPG images to form the video.
And ultimately, this experiment begs the question: how long before DSLRs can reach a full 24 or 30 fps with the same quality and resolution of still images? We hope not too long.
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Good experiment, I always wondered about this (my Nikon only shoots 6fps). “One hell of a 5k camera” is pushing it a bit since it’s limited to 16fps, won’t record audio and you can’t see what you’re shooting, but I get the point.
For the record, my Bolex 16mm shoots 60fps (roughly – it’s an analogue dial) and looks GORGEOUS.
To some extent you’d be able to interpolate the 16fps clip to something close to 24fps, but I don’t know what the result would look like or if it would work well enough to be useable.
I was just thinking this. If you used Twixtor, or even After Effects’ built-in Timewarp plugin (which in my experience does a surprisingly good job of of slowing things down ~50%) you might be able to get some really good stuff. But maybe not. Worth a try! If only I had a 1DX…
Too choppy, not able to record sound, I’m guessing a massive overheating problem *if* you could solve the buffer/storeage space. I’m guessing as well as the video footage seems quite dark & dull colour wise you’re going to need a short shutter or high ISO which would look horrible on anything other then a YouTube clip.
I’d be really interested to see the orginal 5k video rather then the compressed Youtube clip.
All in all a interesting experiement but for video at that price I’d rather get a Sony FS100 or Black Magic Camera.
Well done – you managed to recreate something that Danny Boyle did several years ago on Slumdog Millionare (at 12fps) and which was reported on in Gizmodo as well:
http://gizmodo.com/5130380/slumdog-millionaire-crowd-scenes-shot-covertly-with-canon-still-cameras
“So why not use 1DX bursts as a movie camera? It was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.”
Not so sure . . .
Numbers, numbers, numbers.
(Subtitle: “how to turn your £5,400 DSLR into a disposable camera”)
The Canon 1DX’s shutter is rated around 400,000 actuations – that is to say that after 400,000 clicks its life is over, normally this many actuations would last way past the camera’s natural life span, but start shooting video through stills and the numbers change.
400,000 frames @ 25 fps = 160,000 seconds of footage.
160,000 / 60 = 2,666 minutes of footage.
2,666 / 60 = 44 hours of footage.
So, using a Canon 1DX for video (through stills) will give your camera a life span of 44 hours of video, great video, 5K video, and super sharp video, but very very expensive video.
One other note, you can take the 14 fps 1DX frames and interpolate them to 25fps (or 24/30) using After Effects ‘timewarp’ or something like Twixtor, actual new 5k frames will be generated to fill in the ‘missing’ (in a 25 fps stream) frames, which would give you real 5k video at a standard frame rate.
…
Shutter life time ratings are a minimum, basically when they tested a bunch of them in the lab the first one to fail was at around 400,000 actuations. They give the minimum so they don’t have to pay to fix it if it breaks after that. Chances are it will last far longer than that, most DSLRs do.
Your calculations are also off. Assuming the 1DX actually shot at 25fps you’re off by an order of magnitude as it would only last for 16,000 seconds, or about 4 and a half hours. If we go with what it actually achieves, 14fps, we get a minimum lifetime of nearly 8 hours(assuming that did kill it that’s a cost of £675 per hour of footage, nearly 20p per second, and a little over 1p per frame).
Regardless, who is honestly going to shoot more than perhaps a few minutes of “video” using this method? Anyone needed it for professional use will have the resources of an actual video camera, so that just leaves professional (I hope) photographers that want to have a little fun and experiment.
Yeah, whoops! My calculations were off, you are right it would only give you 4+ hours rather than 44+ . . .
. . . Which only further makes my point, it’s an insanely expensive way to shoot video.