Is the 5D Mark II a 30 fps still camera?

So are you dreaming of shooting sports at 30 frames per second at 1/4000th shutter speeds? Well now you can with the Canon 5D Mark II and the updated firmware 1.1.0 which allows for manual exposure control in video mode. The tough part will be finding the balance between using a high enough shutter speed to freeze the action and trying to keep your video smooth which is accomplished at the slower shutter speeds. But what if you don’t care about the video and only want to frame grab? Might be good cases for that. Like maybe the backswing of a golfer? Tennis? Baseball (at the plate)?

What else might this be good for? You can’t count on the auto focus tracking a subject while shooting in video mode, so I wouldn’t expect football, soccer or basketball to work well.

Ah, but it’s cheating, you say? I say no. It’s using a tool. If a Mark III could shoot 30 frames per second, I’m betting no one would complain.

I shot a little test video of my pigeons being released in my backyard using two 5D Mark II’s shot at slow and fast shutter speeds. Hopefully you can see the difference in the video quality: The higher shutter speed producing jumpy, flickery video and the slower shutter speed providing a smoother look.

You can download the frame grabs to see the difference up close. They were captured in Final Cut Pro.

Frame grab from video shot at 1/2000th of a second. The resulting file size is 1920px by 1080px, about 6Mb.

Frame grab from video shot at 1/30th of a second. The resulting file size is 1920px by 1080px, about 6Mb.

Here is a test frame from Rob Carr of the AP. He says he plans to test it out more during a tournament in the coming weeks. That's a very publishable image there (remember what we used to get with the Nikon D1?).