House, TV Season Finale, Shot Entirely On Canon 5D

Do you love the Fox TV series House?

Well, we are fans of grumpy doctors! We think the show is great but we’re loving it more because House used Canon 5D Mark II to shoot its season finale.

It’s amazing how digital SLRs like the Canon 5D Mark II is now capable of shooting HD videos in broadcast quality.

The news camera from House director Greg Yaitanes via Twitter.

Yaitanes stated that the Canon 5D was a great tool for shooting “tight spaces” needed in the finale.

Canon prime lenses, plus the 24-70 and 70-200 zoom were used in shooting the show. Yaitanes revealed that they did not use any image stabilizer rig for the non-tripod shots, which is a big testament to the quality of the Canon 5D Mark II.

Shooting House TV season finale with a Canon 5D Mark II is an amazing experiment, a great testimonial to the HD capabilities of digital SLR and a great publicity strategy.

The House finale will be broadcast on May 17 and even if you’re not a fan but just a photography geek it would be great to observe how Canon 5D Mark II really performed.  You may catch Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) cracking a camera joke.

Here are some of the questions answered by House director Greg Yaitanes on Twitter and compiled by Petapixel….

@MVRamunno: What is the difference in how it looks on a TV screen compared to a regular camera?

Greg Yaitanes: richer. shallow focus pulls the actors faces to forground [sic]

@oamad0101: How many frames per second and why a Canon 5D Mark II?

GY: 24p and wanted it for ease of use in tight spaces.

@unikissa: Ok, seriously. Can you tell us something about the lenses you used?

GY: all the Canon primes and the 24-70 and the 70-200 zoom

@sarabury: Did you have to change any of your working practices to fit in with differences between the 5D and a typical setup?

GY: some. focus was hard with these lenses but more “cine-style” lenses are being made as we speak.

@marykir: were you using CF cards for storage or some sort of mass storage mod? seems like you would need a lot of cards

GY: some 18gb or something like that card. gave us 22 min of footage.

@Drdiagnostic: How was the quality as compared 2 the traditional camera used in shooting?

GY: i loved it and feel it’s the future. cameras that can give you these looks

@klizma: How did you manage to stabilize the camera in tight spaces? Any special kind of brackets?

GY: no. mostly gave it a hand held feel. or on a small tripod

Fine out more about digital camcorders.