Canon announced a new Rebel yesterday. Capable of shooting in HD (720p), it is a serious alternative to the 5D. It is not 1080p but lets be honest, 720p is excellent, I resample everything to this size or smaller anyways so this isn’t a problem for msot people.

In fact, the first thing that came to my mind after seeing this announcement was WTF? The general consensus over why the 5D firmware is crippled as always been the fear of Canon to cannibalize sales of the “real” video camera. Yet, they put on the market a camera that cannibalizes sales of the 5DMrkII. There is something seriously broken in the Canon marketing department!

Don’t get me wrong, this new Rebel is going to be an incredible success, even more so than the 5DMrkII. The problem is that I (and the community) was expecting a new firmware, not another crippled camera. It seems now obvious to me that we won’t see any manual control for DSLRs, except maybe with the next release of the 1D line later this year.

Canon, I will be very happy if you prove me wrong!

Stu at Prolost was faster than me to react to the possibilities offered by the upcoming iPhone OS. While his ideas are not really possible because of their CPU requirements, mine is more realistic: basically, I would like to be able to do remote shooting, with live preview, via my iPhone. That is all. Of course all of Stu ideas are great and I would like to see them too.

Apple said that they have opened the API to external hardware supplier. I cant wait to see how far they have gone because this could give us a lot of opportuinity!

I dont know if you tag, but I do. I try to do it a lot and sometimes it makes me think that the guys at Apple dont use the tagging interface at all…

• First, as I said in the past, when you open the Keyword HUD, the cursor should be in the search field. And the current content should be pre-selected.
• The search algorithm should not just look for keywords starting with the search term but for those that contain the search term, where ever it is placed. It is “like ‘%criteria_term%’” and not just ”like ‘criteria_term%’”. Small difference but a lot of frustration.
• There should be some built in intelligence which recognizes when you have two similar tags in different categories and pops a warning.
• We need a feature to point the tags that are not used so we can do some cleanup.
• Is it too much to ask to have a tag cloud when we create keyword based smart albums? Please.
• Talking about smart albums, I would like to be able to have all pictures with tags X but NOT tag Y.

I think it is enough, for now… I dont know if you have guessed but I just completed a 2 hours tagging marathon. I was lagging behind in my tagging for a while and tonight I had to pay the price of my procrastination!

You must have noticed by now that a lot of cinephotographers are using old Nikon or Zeiss lenses with their 5DMrkII. These lenses allow their owner to set the aperture directly on the lens, removing one of the variable of the automatic exposure control in video mode.

I must admit that I was about to get one of these. They are just so more convenient than the series of tasks required to get the desired aperture/ISO/shutter speed.

Well, if you can wait a few more days (or week), the next firmware update from Canon might make these lenses obsolete!

Ok, this is all rumors and speculations from www.5dfix.com but it seems plausible in the current context. Lets not forget that competitors are coming in with video d-SLR or bridge cameras too and they have been listening to all cinephotographers complains! They offer full control over the exposure triangle, 24p and even 60fps!

Nothing like competition to push innovation! And nothing like a rumors to give us hope!

I think I talked too fast the other day when I said that the software update did not fix the stuck pixel problem. After testing it again, it seems like the issue is now resolved with v1.07!

I will do more testing tomorrow night, but right now I am reformating-reinstalling everything on my Mac Pro. The new setup is:

• 2×74gig raptors in RAID-0 for boot partition
• 2×500gig WD in RAID-0 for content
• External 1Tb USB HD for backup and time machine

I have yet to complete the installation of the second RAID but so far, this beast is FAST! Yes yes, I know the risk of RAIDing everything but with a good backup policy it should be ok. Since I am working on only one project at the time I should be fine with storage space.

My main concern right now is the noise level of the Raptors. I will work with these for a few days and see if I can tolerate them. They are really annoying once you start paying attention to them…

The issue

At first, I thought it was dust. Dust on the sensor or on the lens. Then, after watching every single video I shot since I got the camera, I saw something worst than the black dot problem: hot pixels! And to make things worst, there are 2 of them!

I did not notice them at first because most of my shots were done in bright light but last weekend I had to shoot some video for the CD launch of my friend Jon Davis (f1.4 ISO3200, hence the noise…) and the white dots on the dark background cant be missed.

This is a rare but not unknown issue.Bbut it seems like there is some confusion between people having serious noise issues while taking long low light pictures (a problem I am not having) and the problem I am having with videos. My problem is not noise, it really is white (hot) pixels. Take a look at the screen capture:

Click to enlarge

You can see a 100% crop of the problematic area here:

While it is not very noticeable on still images, as soon as the camera starts panning it jumps off the screen and destroy the whole scene. You can see it in the home made clip I did last week too.

What I have tried so far

First, I used the manual auto-cleaning feature about 10 times in a row to see if it could “unstuck” the pixel without success. Then I updated the firmware to 1.07 and they are still there.

My last resort was to call the store. They were very helpful. I will have to bring my camera back Friday and they will see if they can trade mine for a new one straight or, at worst, send it for repair (urck!). If they send it for repair I will try to get an “equivalent” camera until I have my replacement. By equivalent I am of course thinking about these Hasselblad that no body ever rents!

I will report back on this Friday.