Firmware

For just over 2 years I had been only occasionally trying out the video feature, but I was still having trouble making it keep the settings I wanted it to be shooting at, I'd previously looked online to see how to do this and had found a tutorial on how to sort of trick the camera into keeping the aperture you wanted but locking the exposure but this was a bit hit and miss because it depended on the lighting conditions not being too light as the iso and shutter speed would adjust themselves accordingly - this had always put me off doing much filming before.. I had started to see more and more people producing amazing footage with it and I could see they must have learnt how to make the camera use the exposure settings they wanted!
It wasn't until I saw my friends at Allora Visuals filming that I realised they had full control over the exposure settings and  quickly realised I'd been using the original firmware system for the camera still and had missed a couple of updates which had vastly improved the video capacities.. Definitely felt pretty silly about that but it did really lift my resistance to experimenting with video and it was also nice to know the stunning work I'd seen other producing with these cameras would be a lot more achievable for me now!

This post probably isn't very relevant anymore as most Canon 5D MkII's bought after the firmware update will be installed with a more recent version but it explains the main reason it took me so long to get onto the moving image bandwagon!

Memory Cards...

The first obstacle I came up against when experimenting with the video features was one that meant I could only record for roughly 20 seconds at the time, as I was mainly working with stills and occasionally experimenting with video it took me quite a while to realise this wasn't supposed to happen... I'd initially put it down to the internal computer not being quick enough to write the data to the memory card, but when I thought about it a bit more I realised it may be the memory card I had been using - it was a really basic SanDisk 4GB card I'd had for years - In my photography I shoot quite slowly so I'd never had any need for a quicker card (that also quickly changed after I saw the file sizes of RAW images on the 5D MkII.)

When I tried out a quicker card I found that I could film for as long as the memory card had free space - so that was my first obstacle overcome!

In retrospect I do realise that I would have probably found the solution for this probably if I'd looked in the instruction manual, but I don't often read them and didn't particularly need to use the video functions at this point!