Canon 50D Movie Mode Possibilities

Written by Eric Reagan on September 6th, 2008 | 6 Comments


An industrious forum poster over at DVX User dreamed up a little DIY project that will make you go “hmm”.

Depending on the capabilities of the Canon 50D HDMI output, this may or may not be possible; however, here’s his thoughts on the above mockup:

I imagine a Zeiss Planar glass (cause I know it locks at infinite focus)
mounted on a railsystem
with followfocus attached to the lens
a little mount adapter screws it to the
50d
the short hdmi cable goes to the portable hdmi recorder (haven’t looked into those products yet) also attached to rails

This guy thinks we might be able to use the increased resolution of the Canon 50D along with the HDMI output to do some fancy HD video.  (Sample video after the jump.)

While I’m not going to turn a 50D into the above monstrosity, it’s always interesting to how people find a way to get gear to do things it was never contemplated to do.

Think this is all just wishful thinking?  Take a second and watch the below video that the above-mentioned forum poster put together using the 40D’s live view function.  The only question he’s got is whether you can shut off the white center box in the 50D (you can’t in the 40D).  Anyone know the answer to that?

Now, what’s your thoughts on this contraption?



6 Responses to “Canon 50D Movie Mode Possibilities”

  1. sebastienb

    Thats nice, now imagine what you can do with th ed90 all you need is an xlr audio recorder like belkin ipod audio recorder and your set!

  2. Joel

    That’s awesome! It looks like you could achieve a shallow DOF that would be hard to get in anything but Cinema Film Cameras (But I’ve never played with a $$$ HD Camera either).

  3. Eddy

    I read somewhere that in For CAnon 40D in Manual mode you can move the focusing frame out of center to one side or corner and afterwards crop it out in editing software. (well you loose some part of an image, thou)

    Does this “monster-system” autofocus ? From video it seems that no.

    Eddy
    http://www.canon50d.us

  4. JSonMaui

    The new 5D shoots video and the processor is the same as the 50D. A firmware solution might make the 50D video capable.

  5. James

    Could the 40D/50D not just be tethered to a laptop and the live feed captured? Even if it was just a video screen capture the results wouldn’t be half bad!

  6. denim

    :-)
    you can also try to use the software which are included in the canon package and capture it from pc. you need to have a usb connection, but movie is not so fluent as it’s out from video.. :S

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