adventures with the 550D, aka: the tortoise and the hare

I am the proud new parent of a Canon 550D, and like any new parent I've experienced some teething pains, so this blog is at least in part to show the rest of you with similar cameras the pitfalls I've found and how to avoid them.

First of all, your card matters. Size wise it will need to be big if you're doing video, especially if you want to shoot at the super shiny 1920x1080 size. What was news to me, though, was that it would have to be "six or above" - in other words, fast enough to process all that video information. I got a 4GB 6 series and a 16GB 10 series, both Sandisks. I went off the advice of a knowledgable seeming bloke in Jessops, who said he wouldn't put his camera in the same room as a Kingston card.

I've been having a lot of fun playing about with its stills capacity, getting to know my lenses and how to work things like appeture and white balance etc. I learned that ISO* is the same as gain for us, and other people call it compensation.

Film wise it's very, very pretty. The video up on stage during lipdub was me, and it bore the increase in size very well.

The biggest stumbling block I encountered was when I went to import all my pretty new files into Final Cut to edit. Like a prize idiot I just copied the files direct from the card via iPhoto (WHY did I think that would work? It's iPhoto for goodness sake!) and then copied the files into my media folder, deleting the originals on the card.

What I found was that FCP ran very slowly, to the point of my footage looking juddery and sticking.

It was only at this point I sought out information about how to deal with this new kind of video ingest and of course I discovered that I had done everything very, very wrong. For details of what to do, check out this great video from Creative Cow, it explains everything.

Luckily for me, all was not lost and I just had to spend ages converting files when I'd far rather be using my time EDITING them.

Aside from the basic learning point about how to import and manage these media files the moral of this story is not to just barge in there all the time, finding out how to do something before you do it can save you headaches and delays later. It's all very Aesop.

*random fact of the day: ISO stands for International Strandards Organisation and used to refer to the light compensation (or gain, to us) of different film stocks back in those prehistoric days when photos were taken on this stuff called film and a computer was a calculator the size of your house.