For the past week, I’ve been working on a Web project for chinadaily.com.cn with the goal of visualizing China’s massive economic growth. This is a time lapse video project that visualizes symbols of rapid development and urbanization. These images are juxtaposed rhythmically against images depicting development’s effect on traditional culture. While this is a video project and doesn’t use still images, one of the great part’s of the Canon 5D Mark II is its ability to shoot still images while shooting video, allowing me to grab some interesting still images while on the project.

Taking Still Photos While Taking Movies

It’s possible to take still photos at any desired image quality setting while taking movies, simply by pressing the camera’s shutter button. This function provides a great deal of flexibility to photographers who may need to capture both still and video images of the same subject. This is not the same thing as grabbing a frame from the video footage; instead, the still image(s) are recorded as separate files and stored on the memory card the same way as other still images. When taking still images during a movie, Live View is interrupted temporarily. It resumes automatically when the last exposure ends. The movie clip continues to record while the still images are being taken, with the result that there’s a short gap during playback at the point when the still images were taken.

CONSTRUCTION IN FRONT OF YONGHEGONG

As someone who always wants to do more than one thing at once — this is a great novelty. A lot of time lapse video just takes patience — sitting, watching, waiting (repeat) and than a stupid amount of time in front of the computer waiting for video to render and deinterlace. Being able to shoot stills while watching the video capture makes this process a lot less boring. Video does skip for 1 second during this process; however, when your shooting 10 minutes to compress into 10 seconds, this isn’t a big deal.

Here is a sneak preview of some of the scenes you will see in the video coming next week, as well as a demonstration of the 5D Mark II’s ability to shoot stills during video mode.

The shots above and below were all shot during video mode.

Time lapse problems with the Canon 5D

I did encounter some issues with the 5D’s ability to capture long shots for time lapse purposes. Most of the clips for this video are between 5 minutes and 1 hour long, and than slowed down or speed up to 500-1500 times the real speed in Final Cut Pro. According to Canon:

The EOS 5D Mark II will record movies up to 4GB per clip or a maximum continuous movie capture time of 29 minutes and 59 seconds, whichever comes first. Depending on the level of detail in the scene, a 4GB memory card can record approximately 12 minutes of movies at full HD resolution or approximately 24 minutes in standard definition

This ends up being a problem, for example, if you wanted to shoot sky movement over a cityscape continuously for 1 day. However, for the purposes of my video, most of the clips going into the movie are around 5 to 10 seconds (in real time, about 3 to 5 minutes). If anyone knows a work around to this problem, I would love to hear a solution.