A D90 user films some porsches racing and yes, there appears to be some jello. Guess you’ll have to be very careful how you film things if you want to avoid the delicious fruity gel:
Jello:

No Jello- static shot:

Say what you will about Canon, but this video taken with the EOS5D-mkII looks pretty good to my eyes- it’s even shot at night and I can’t see any particular noise or anything. It’s on a tripod, so there’re no jello shots.

It’ll be interesting to see if the D3x has video or when we’ll be seeing a top of the line Nikon body with video.

I’d love to see the same thing compared against the drool-inducing 85mm f/1.2.

Canon EOS5DmkII, One night in Beijing. from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

RED corp, founded by the guy who started Oakley sunglasses, had a cool idea a couple of years- make a digital video recorder that can use interchangeable lenses (even Nikon and Canon lenses with adapters) with quality as good as 35mm film and sell it for ($17,000) a whole lot less than normal professional movie cameras ($100’s of thousands).

Surprisingly to me, and probably others, they delivered. It’s surprising because it’s not at all unusual for a company to come out of nowhere and promise of disruptive technologies and never hear from them again (hey, remember Silicon Film? They went from ~1997 announcement to 2008 bankrupcy?)

Well lately, they’ve been talking about coming out with an SLR, or video camera with SLR-like capabilities using their movie camera’s 25mp chip (presumedly).

This might be nothing for Nikon and Canon to worry about but it sure would be interesting to have a movie camera capable of good stills, that didn’t suffer from Jello-Shots, and could use just about whatever Nikon or Canon (and others with proper adapters) lenses you wanted to throw at it.

Unfortunately though, the RED cameras (so far) don’t have any sort of autofocus, so I wonder about these in fast-action situations.

If I was putting money on it, I’d think this’ll be interesting to watch but won’t give the Dynamic Duo (Nikon, Cannon) and sleepless nights, at least for a few different revisions of their new system.

Ok, she ain’t a dedicated HD video camera, but she actually does pretty well against real video-only cameras if you don’t wobble the camera too much while you’re shooting.

If you can get past the ads between every page, you’ll eventually come to the conclusion- and keep in mind, these are video dorks, not stills-dork (like me):

Comparing the Nikon D90 to HD camcorders may be unfair, but, being the first of its kind, its the only product we could put it up against. The Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the second SLR to record video, has impressive specs—a 1920 x 1080 video quality, stereo microphone input, and an H.264 video compression codec. The question will be, would you rather pay $999.95 ($1299.95 with the lens) to play around with video on the Nikon D90, or shell out $1700 more to get your hands on the Canon? Then, of course, you need to question whether a first generation product is ever a good investment. Stay skeptical.

[Update: due to popular demand, I've added the picture. If this gets me in trouble, for some reason, it your bastards' faults!]

D90 Jello-Shots!

Here’s a great article on why we’re seeing deliciously wobbly jello shots in movie mode on various SLR’s.

I was going to include this picture (mildy racy) to illustrate this story, but decided against it. Leave a comment if I didn’t make the right choice.

Nikon D90 movies are getting out and we’re starting to see how they handle real-world situations, and I don’t mean during earthquakes! But viewing the footage below, you’d think that house was made out of jello and St. Andreas was happy that day.

If you  have a D90, I’m guessing that you’re going to want to use a tripod and I’m also very curious as to how quickly moving subjects are going to show up.

If this “jello” effect is common, then movie mode isn’t going to be too useful.

I’ve read that Canon has similar problems, I’ll try and get some examples for you.