Video With a DSLR Camera: Pros and Cons

Photography Tips

*DSLR stands for Dig­i­tal Sin­gle Lens Reflex. It’s a type of camera used exclusively for photography in the past. In 2008 Canon start­ing adding a video mode to their DSLR cam­eras. They had no idea the phe­nom­e­non that it would bring.

DSLRs have huge sen­sors (the mech­a­nism that con­verts light to video) and way more, cheaper, high qual­ity lenses (also referred to as “glass”). These fac­tors give DSLR cam­eras very sharp imagery as well as a very shal­low depth of field. Depth of field or DOF, refers to the focus of the image or video. A deep DOF is when the fore­ground and the back­ground of an image are both in focus. You see this com­monly in land­scape shots.

Example Video Filmed Primarily with Canon 5D Mark II’s and Canon Rebel T2i’s:

Shal­low Dof is when one part of the image is in focus while the rest is not. For exam­ple, imag­ine a romance movie. About 3/4 of the way through the film, the man and woman run to one another and kiss in the rain. On a close-up of them kiss­ing, you’d see them in focus, with the back­ground out of focus. You see it all the time in the movies, almost always used dur­ing back and forth dia­logue when 2 actors are talk­ing. This is a very sought after look by video pro­fes­sion­als and before DSLR video was extremely expen­sive to achieve. DSLR cam­eras achieve this look for a fifth of the price.

I started my videog­ra­phy career with a Sony VX-2000. It’s an older lit­tle Sony pro­sumer standard-def cam­corder. After I mas­tered that I was ready to upgrade to a Hi-def cam­era, but I didn’t have much money and good cam­eras are very expen­sive. I saw the qual­ity that DSLRs are capa­ble of and I became very inter­ested. The Canon 60D was in my price range and I bought it. It came with a 18-135mm EF-S lens. It shot 1080i and 720p at 24, 30 and 60fps (frames per sec­ond). It was a good cam­era and I really liked it. How­ever I got the oppor­tu­nity to upgrade to the Mer­cedes Benz of DSLRs…. The Canon 5D Mark II. I also got it with a 24-105mm canon L-series lens. It shoots beau­ti­ful, crys­tal clear, film­like video and I love it. Now here are the pros and cons

What’s great about DSLRs for video, and the rea­son they are so pop­u­lar, is the film­like qual­ity with the shal­low depth of field you can obtain for a much, much lower price. For exam­ple, experts often com­pare the canon 5d mark II to the Red One cam­era, which costs $25k. Now of course the Red One is a nicer cam­era, it shoots at 2k res­o­lu­tion, but it’s $25,000, the canon 5d mark II is $2,500 and the qual­ity is com­pa­ra­ble. For Inter­net and DVD pur­poses, the qual­ity is neg­li­gi­ble. In the­atre it would be obvi­ous, but what your video looks like in movie the­atres is not rel­e­vant to most. Any­way the point is the qual­ity for the price is incredible.

Now here’s the cons. No mat­ter how awe­some the video qual­ity is, it doesn’t change the fact that DSLRs are built for still pho­tog­ra­phy and only recently started offer­ing video. This means that they have crude audio capa­bil­i­ties. No man­ual audio gain con­trols with­out hacks or patches, no xlr (high qual­ity audio input), the built in mic is too low qual­ity to use, also it’s small and with­out a han­dle so it’s dif­fi­cult to oper­ate smoothly and it doesn’t have a con­trolled zoom.

All these cons have workarounds but it’s a more dif­fi­cult process than with a reg­u­lar video cam­era and it costs money. Even with these costly extras DSLR cam­eras are still worth the money but the ease of use and time it takes to bal­ance out the short­com­ings depend entirely on you. You absolutely have to get a sta­bi­liz­ing rig for smooth shoot­ing off the shoul­der, oth­er­wise your footage will be too shaky. These rigs aver­age around $500 with the higher qual­ity ones around $2,000. You can do what some peo­ple do and build your own rig or order the com­po­nents sep­a­rately and assem­ble it your­self. I’m going to do an entire post ded­i­cated to choos­ing or build­ing a rig and once it’s com­plete I’ll insert a link to it here.

Because the DSLR has poor audio capa­bil­i­ties, what most peo­ple do is buy a portable audio recorder to cap­ture audio sep­a­rately from the cam­era. You plug your mic in use that to dig­i­tally record your audio. Thats a great way to get high qual­ity audio, the prob­lem is, since the video and audio are not being recorded by the same device, you’ll need to sync these in post. You can do this man­u­ally using the a clap­per or snap etc. but there is a much sim­pler solu­tion which is a pro­gram called plural eyes. Plural eyes will auto­mat­i­cally sync your video to your audio in your time­line. It does this by lin­ing up the sep­a­rately recorded audio wave­forms to the audio wave­forms recorded by your low qual­ity built in cam­era mic. It’s not always per­fect but if you’re get­ting decent audio from your cam­era then it works quickly and effec­tively. There’s also a sis­ter pro­gram called dual eyes that will auto­mat­i­cally sync all the video files to all the audio files out­side of your edit­ing application.

In con­clu­sion, DSLRs give you excel­lent qual­ity for the price. How­ever, you’ll need to decide for your­self whether or not the short­com­ings of shoot­ing with a pho­tog­ra­phy cam­era are accept­able to you as a video creator.

I hope this article outlining the pros and cons of shooting video with a DSLR has been helpful to you…

About the Author:
For more information regarding videography or editing, please visit The Video Genius. Lowell Brillante, Videographer and Digital Editor based in Charlotte NC.