Brian Kaufman

There are some beautiful shots in there, and I love what you did with the color. The one thing to look out for it the horizon. Unless you went with slightly dutch angles intentionally, the horizon in many of the shots is off from perfectly horizontal and it distracted my eye a bit. I believe the T2i has a built in electronic level (and any good fluid head should also have a built in bubble level for you). Great work!

Another important difference is that the 7d outputs a full resolution (1080P) signal, while the T2i can only output 480P while shooting (I believe it is 1080P while not recording). This is due to the single vs. double processors on the T2i vs. 7D.

There is sadly no way to do this. It's one or another. The 7D actually doesn't have hacked firmware like the 5D (magic lantern). You can get multiple monitors up and running if you get a powered HDMI splitter to run your signal to multiple external monitors. Hope that helps, sorry for the bad news.

While we all dream of big fast, long focus draw cinema lenses (Panny primes, etc.), you can get away with using still lenses if you use the right ones and mate it with a decent follow focus and some focus whips (for example, from Redrock Micro, but there are many other options). I'm currently using old Nikon AI-s primes from the 80s. They have the advantages of rugged build and long (pre-autofocus, 270 degrees+) focus pulls. Now, you still don't get the super accurate distance marks, and that where I find the follow focus gets to be invaluable. If you work with actors who can hit marks, you can mark off your points of focus as needed and get very clean rack focuses. It's not ideal, but you can BUY many of these lenses for under 300$ (and some under 100$) and get great quality from them. I'm not an expert, but this has worked for me on a budget, and it might be worth trying with a rental from borrowlenses.com. In terms of sharpness, I would be surprised if the L lens was the issue with the house episode. These lenses resolve cleanly for 25 megapixel stills, I don't see how they would fail to resolve to a binned 1080p image. I would expect any issue with sharpness was either due to intentional softening (to avoid moire and aliasing) or due to the codec the 5D spits out (it's not bad, but it's not great either). That's just my .02, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong :-) Hope I was helpful.

Shakil, This is a very good start. The most important thing is that you picked a subject who is interesting. I was immediately drawn in by the images of this unique person (he writes much more beautiful letters using his mouth than I ever could with my hands!) and that is the most important thing with a documentary. In terms of the image, you have some very moving shots in there. Since this was your first day with the camera, I am guessing you didn't have access to a variable ND filter, but your outdoor scenes were a bit over-exposed. You had another shot showing the bike and cart that was a bit shaky and would have looked best on a tripod. You framed a lot of very beautiful shots on this preview and throughout the video I was interested, so good job! Brian