About the project

On the 9th of November 2009 I embarked on a documentary commissioned by NGO “Initiatives of Change” and produced by Pilgrim Films. The mission was to follow an unconventional banker who supports micro financing and works on the grass root level in the Yercaud region South West of India. The film directed by Andrew Hinton was primarily made for an international finance conference that was going to be held in Mumbai 2 weeks later. On our return the film, “Banking on Change” won the 4Docs ‘Good to Know’ competition’ and Andrew put together a 3-minute cut for the Channel 4, 3-Minute wonder strand.

We left London within our luggage allowance carrying with us the following equipment:

• 1x Sony EX1 with 56GBs worth of SxS cards;
• 1x Canon 5D mark II with 32GBs worth of CF cards, a 50mm f1.4 and a 28mm T+S f3.5;
• 2x radio mics, 1x sennheiser 416 mounted onto the camera;
• 2x macpros and 2x 500GB Lacie rugged hard drives;

The first thing was to setup the cameras to get a pretty good match in order to mix the images later on in the edit. I went and based my 5D settings on Stu Maschwitz’s custom settings. He offers a good starting point to increase the dynamic range of the recorded image. So starting with the Neutral Settings in Manual Mode, I adjusted like Stu:

• Sharpness all the way down
• Contrast all the way down
• Saturation two notches down

I then saved this as one of my custom settings and copied all the resulting into my custom functions C.Fn.I, II and III. Before copying it over I set the following:

• C.Fn.I: Shutter Speed 1/60s, Aperture: f5.6, ISO 160, WB 7000K and Highlight Tone Priority Disabled (use this in outdoor)
• C.Fn.II: Shutter Speed 1/60s, Aperture: f2.8, ISO 320, WB Automatic and Highlight Tone Priority Disabled (use this in mixed interior/exterior)
• C.Fn.II: Shutter Speed 1/30s, Aperture: f1.4, ISO 1600, WB 3200K and Highlight Tone Priority Disabled (use this in dark interiors)

I figured that this gives me enough flexibility to just switch rapidly between common real life situations without having to always reset all parameters. Those who have shot with the 5D would have noticed that once the Live View times out and the shutter mirror closes, the camera resets ISO, Aperture, WB, and Shutter Speed to whatever values you assigned in the Custom Functions.

I particularly like Stu’s settings as they offer a greater latitude and give you a flatter image to work with in the grade but I personally don’t agree with enabling the Highlight Tone Priority as it introduces noise into the shadows. I invite you to check out the cinema5D discussion forum if you want to try out other configurations. Another link on the cinema5D forum suggests that the 5D renders the least amount of noise when the ISO is set to a multiple of 160. One of the posts on there goes as far as suggesting the following:

• ISO 100 = ISO 100
• ISO 125 = ISO 100 + digital push –> more noise
• ISO 160 = ISO 200 – digital pull –> less noise, less dynamic range
• ISO 200 = ISO 200
• ISO 250 = ISO 200 + digital push –> more noise
• ISO 320 = ISO 400 – digital pull –> less noise, less dynamic range
• ISO 400 = ISO 400
• etc…

The 5D II supports only ISO (100?),200,400,800,1600,3200 as native. All other sensitivities seem to be created during post-processing.