How to Film a Real Estate Video with Canon EOS R5 C, by Parker Walbeck

Alright, today I’m going to be walking you through my process for shooting and editing a luxury real estate video. Now it’s been a few years since I’ve done a tutorial on real estate so I wanted to give you guys an update on my workflow.

Now this video is going to be a condensed version for YouTube focusing mostly on filming the interior of a home but if you’d like to see a longer version of this behind the scenes showing a much more detailed version of my shooting and editing process, link is in the description to join Real Estate Video Pro or it’s also included in our full course full time filmmaker.

Now before we get started this video is sponsored by Canon. They’ve been my go to camera brand for the past decade now. I own 10 Canon bodies and that number keeps going up as they continue making great products that I want to try out and in today’s video I’ll be showing you how I use the Canon EOS R5C and my goal is to help you decide if this camera fits into your shooting style and workflow or not.

As always though opinions are my own, all the sponsorship requires me to do is focus today’s tutorial around how I specifically use their gear. So let’s jump right in. Alright we are on location at a beautiful $6 million Real Estate luxury home in St.

George, Utah and we are about to shoot an awesome Real Estate video. Now the gear we’re using today is the Canon EOS R5C and on here we have the RF 15 to 35 millimeter lens and you see that it’s attached to a battery 99 volts.

That’s going to allow us to have battery all day long about six hours is what this battery gives you and then of course we have this all on a gimbal. Now I’ve talked about in past videos how my go -to setup is the Canon C70.

I use it for about 80% of my shoots as my A camera and my B camera that I’ve been using is the R5. However, it is a photo first camera. So in video mode, there are some limitations to be aware of. Now for those of you who don’t have the luxury of owning both a C70 and an R5, Canon made this, which is meant to be in between both the C70 and the R5 giving you features from each.

So I’m gonna be showing you in today’s video how I use the R5C to its fullest potential. So when it comes to shooting real estate, the first thing I look for is lighting. That’s one of the biggest things you wanna be aware of when shooting real estate.

So before I even get here, days before I’m scheduling out the time of day, I schedule with the real estate agent to come before the sun rises, so I get the sunrise. And I usually shoot two or three hours in the morning and then I come back in the evening and I’ll shoot sunset and blue hour after sunset.

Now you’re not always gonna have the luxury to pick the exact times the day you shoot, but if possible, that is what I’d recommend for the best possible lighting. And so we’re gonna go ahead and get started.

So we’re gonna shoot the kitchen first here. Now focal length wise. I got the 15 -35 because I want to make the house look as big as possible. Now this house is already really big, so I may not need to use it as wide as I usually do, but usually I’m shooting at 15mm.

Now, if I were to use the C70 in order to get that wide, I’d have to use a .71x adapter and then put on the EF 16 -35 lens, which is fine. However, that lens does not have image stabilization. The RF 15 -35 does have image stabilization, and anyone who uses Gimbal’s knows there’s a little bit of micro -dittering going on in most your shots.

And turning on that image stabilization is just going to smooth that out and prevent me from having to use warp stabilizer and post and so forth. So that’s one of the big benefits of being able to shoot on the R5C is because it is a full frame sensor versus the Super 35 sensor of my C70.

But currently the EOS R5C is the only cinema camera that Canon makes in the RF mount that is full frame sensor. So if you want that full frame sensor and I am a full frame sensor snob, I love it. This is the only option you got.

So for real estate specifically, the R5C is actually my go -to camera because of that full frame and ability to use the RF 15 -35 to then have that image stabilization. So let’s go ahead and grab a shot here real quick, show you what we’re looking like.

We’ll do just the kitchen here. Very nice. Looks pretty. And then as far as camera settings, I’m shooting all of this in 8K 60 frames per second in raw light. Now, not all cameras are going to have raw.

And for a lot of years, all I did was shoot in an 8 -bit standard profile. But having the luxury of log and ideally even raw is just going to allow you a lot more flexibility in post to adjust. colors and your exposure in post.

And we’ll talk about that later in the video. But currently, because we have so much natural light, my white balance is set to 5600 Kelvin. ISO is set to 400, and then aperture is at 2 .8, and our shutter speed is double our frame rate at 1 .25.

Now, the reason I shoot in 60 frames per second is because I wanna slow these down in post to 24 frames to get a very slow moving shot. Now, I’m already moving really slow anyway, but by being able to slow it down in post, it’s just going to give me this really slow, beautiful, luxurious feeling.

All right, so let’s get a shot of the living room here. I’m using the dining room as foreground as well to give us a little bit of depth. We’ll just do a little parallax move here. Nice and slow. Getting very wide so you can see the whole area here.

Now, another perk of the R5C, and a reason that I like it with real estate, is… When you’re doing wide angle shots, specifically we’re doing 15 millimeter very wide, what can tend to happen at that focal length and at a 2 .8 aperture, which is what a lot of this is, the image can start to get a little bit soft.

So this is a scenario where having 8K is actually something that I really like. I typically just shoot in 4K and that’s good for most of what I shoot. However, having the ability to shoot in 8K for real estate like this, I mean, there are only 10 second clips, so it’s not like it’s gonna take up a ton of space to be able to do that.

And you’re just gonna be getting a lot more detail. So realistically 4K is gonna be fine in most scenarios, but if you’re a resolution snob and you want that extra detail, 8K is gonna give you even more detail, especially with those wide shots.

Now the other benefit of having 8K is that even if you are just shooting in 4K with this camera, it’s over sampled from the 8K sensor, which means the 4K that it’s giving you is actually gonna be higher quality, more detailed than a regular 4K sensor.

So even if you aren’t ever using 8K, the 4K mode is gonna give you more detail than most 4K sensors. In this room, there’s not a lot of natural light coming in, but there’s a lot of artificial light and the color balance is much different.

So in there, we were at 5600 Kelvin, and now we’re gonna have to do is adjust our color balance, and I’m bringing it down to about 4 ,000 Kelvin. But the thing with when you’re shooting with RAW is that it really doesn’t matter what you set your white balance at.

I can always change it in posts and it’s not gonna lose any of its quality. So as long as I get it somewhat near it, I’m good to go and I don’t have to sit there and think about getting it exactly as close as I can.

So we’ll go ahead and shoot this now. And here we go. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, very nice.

All right, let’s talk for a second about framing or composition. Now with real estate, you wanna try and keep your vertical lines vertical. Now what that means is you don’t wanna be tilting down or tilting up, you wanna keep it vertical.

perfectly level. There are some times where if you’re trying to show a view or a balcony view where you’ll tilt up and down, but most of the time the goal is to keep those lines as straight as possible.

Very nice. Another part of good composition is to try and fill your frame with your subject. And so the meat of the shot is going to happen when you have filled the frame completely with the room. And so I’m starting pretty far back to give you that feeling of going through these doors so we can show some of that foreground and give it some dimension.

But the climax of the shot is once you’ve made it through and this whole bed is filling up your frame. And the last thing about composition that a lot of people ask specifically with real estate shots what do you do for focus?

Now in the past I’ve talked about how I will come to again the Meet the climax of your shot set my focus there then take a few steps back turn off the autofocus And then when I’m back here, it’ll be a little bit out of focus But once I get to this point that’ll be perfectly focused and then as I move past It’ll be a little bit out of focus again But if you have a good autofocus system and the r5c does there are times as long as the room is well Lit and there’s not any blank walls like a blank white wall or a blank black TV Those are the things that are going to screw up your autofocus But if you have good contrast and good detail set your focus on that part of the image and most autofocus systems Specifically cannons are going to be reliable enough.

They’re not going to hunt and jump around. So we’ll do that next I’m going to set focus on this back wall here. So I’ve got that in focus and as I’m moving It’s ever so slightly changing the focus And as far as autofocus settings, I’m just in continuous AF with a small frame selected And then I have the position selectable so I can choose where I want to be selecting in case like right now There’s a black TV.

So to avoid it being on that I can select a different part of my frame All right, let’s talk about camera movements Now as I mentioned before the difference between just looking at photos and watching a video is the movement So you want to try and incorporate a good amount of movement to really sell the fact that you’re walking through the home And so the movements I like to do are pretty much just push -ins But I also usually like to add a little bit of a pan with my push -in so that way I can catch more of the room As I’m pushing through other times I’ll do kind of like a parallax as if like I’m walking by and just looking as I pass by and every once in a while But very rarely will I do a pullout where I’m coming backwards And that’s just because it doesn’t feel like a very natural movement if I were to be walking through the house You don’t typically walk through houses backward.

So let’s go ahead and film this one here This one is just gonna be a straight push in. Now we’re gonna try a push in and a little bit of a pan. Here we go, pushing in and panning slightly left. This one’s gonna be more of a parallax like I’m passing through.

And I just like to get a few different options of movements, woo! Because you never know, oh come on. Because you never know which option you’ll end up liking best. Sometimes you think on set, oh I like this movement the best, but if you do a couple options, you may find in post that actually a second or third option you got ended up looking better.

Set downstairs to some low light. All right, we’re now down in the basement. I’ve got my screen recording here so you can see what I’m doing as I change my settings. So as you can see, I currently have it at 5600 Kelvin, 2 .8 aperture, 400 ISO.

1 over 125 shutter. So first thing, make sure your aperture is as low as it can go. We’ve done that. And now you have two options. You can either bump up the ISO, where you can bring down your shutter speed, which you’ll also have to bring down your frame rate as well.

But let’s first pump up the ISO here. Now on the EOS R5C, it has a dual native ISO at 800 and 3200 when shooting in RAW. Now we’re also going to change the color balance and we need to bring that down.

So I’m feeling like it’s about 3200 Kelvin. So notice when I go from 2 ,500 to 3 ,200, there’s a shift in quality. Some of that noise is getting reduced at 3 ,200. So we’ll zoom in and show you the noise reduction that’s happening when you shift to that 3 ,200.

So specifically on the R5C, you’re going to be in low light and you’re going to be pumping up your ISO to 1 ,600, 2 ,000. Go all the way to 3 ,200. You hit that new shelf, the other native ISO, and it’s going to give you a lot cleaner image.

All right, so let’s get a shot here. I’m going to set my focus over here on these paintings where there’s some good light and contrast. Let’s now do a little push in and slight pan. Now on the other side of the coin from low light, you have what is a common problem in real estate, which is dealing with blown out windows.

And again, this comes down to lighting, trying to find the right time of day for each set of windows. This isn’t the best time of day for where we’re at right here, but as far as how to expose for these, you’re trying to keep the interior, which is typically going to be the subject for the most important part of your frame, as bright as possible while still retaining as much outdoor information as possible.

And so here I’m at a 2 .8 aperture, but the windows are a little bit more… bit blown out and then if I come down to like a seven aperture that’s where the outside starts to have you know pretty much all the details but inside is now looking a little bit too dark so I’d probably come to about right here is 4 .5 where we’re still pretty bright inside but are retaining more of the detail outside now again I’ll come back at a different time of day and hopefully I’ll be able to get a little bit even more detail outside by not having quite as much sun blazing against that building back there but we’ll go ahead and get a shot here do a little parallax you can see it really start to blow out back there on this side and if there wasn’t direct sunlight on all that stuff back there then it wouldn’t be nearly as bad so ideally you do this one in the morning because you have the Sun is setting over here and it rises over here So if you had the sun just rising over here, it would be streaming light into here.

So you’d be able to see all the natural light, but all these buildings would be dark because they’re shaded. They don’t have sun directly on them. So that’s the kind of stuff you want to be looking for.

So ideally we would shoot that part in the morning. So that’s why I talked about, you know, when you schedule these out, try and do both golden hour in the morning and golden hour in the evening. So you have all possible best lighting options for each part of the house to get the best possible lighting and most exposure of both indoor and outdoor.

Well, now one other thing to consider is the height of the camera. Now, if you get too high, you start to make the ceilings look low. So you want to make the rooms feel big and you want to make the ceilings feel high.

That’s what’s going to help sell these homes. But you also don’t want to get too low. If you get too low, then you start to be blocked by all the furniture. I’m pretty short. And so for me, it’s pretty comfortably, just kind of stomach level, chest level.

All right, we got some nice golden hour coming in now. Golden hour is beginning. This is an example of a room that looks great. The sun is actually leaking in and giving you natural light coming in to the room and you get the sun flutter behind it.

Let’s go outside now. All right, so we just wrapped up shooting all the interior, at least in this lighting, we’ll come back in after a blue hour. But we’re heading outside now to do some exteriors. And one of the differences between the R5C and the C70 is this does not have built -in ND filters.

However, with real estate video specifically, I wouldn’t use ND filters because all of its wide angle, and for the most part, I’m shooting pretty much wide open at 2 .8, sometimes four aperture. Again, one of the perks of the C70 wouldn’t even come into play.

So using the R5C isn’t even gonna matter that it doesn’t have an ND filter. What I am gonna do though is put on a Polarize. What this does is it allows me to have more vibrant skies, cuts out some of the reflections and some of the greenery, and just makes everything look more vibrant and kind of cheats that it has higher dynamic range as well.

So go ahead and pop that on. I’ll have to rebalance my gimbal here. By the way, everything that you see here on my setup, everything I’m using, link below kit .co slash Parker Wallbeck. You can buy anything that I’m using today and see my whole setup.

Okay, so we are doing exterior now. I told you that I don’t like doing tilt up and downs very often. Here’s a time where I do one because as you can see, when it’s just a level horizon, I’m cutting off the house because it’s so tall.

And here we go. Now we’re gonna do kind of a parallax move over here. Just trying to keep the house framed in the center there. Okay so that’s pretty much it for the front yard. We’ll go in the backyard to get a couple there.

Let’s see if we can turn these guys on. There’s any water features or fire pits you want to turn those on. I’ve got the big door open over here to show that off. Turn on all the lights. I don’t know how to turn the fire pit on.

Get a lighter. Hold on. Well I can’t find a lighter but turn on the fire pit. All the features there. So we’re going to back up as much as we can here. Do a little tilt up here. This is where having a wide angle lens is very necessary.

If you had a 35 millimeter you just wouldn’t be able to capture the house. Even a 20 millimeter you can’t get all of it. 15 you can finally see the whole house. A little bit of blue hour left. I’m going to try and get a few interior shots that might look better during blue hour.

This is one of them right here. Okay so I just want to get a shot approaching this front door because the lighting was so drastic inside and outside before. It’s kind of a hard one to get earlier. Now though I think we have some prettier lighting.

Got the reflections on the windows here. So let’s do this main room too. And as you can see in here we can now much better see out these windows. I forgot to turn it back to non -tilting mode. I’m going to get those lines straight.

And then we’ll do some facing towards the house. So we already got these shots earlier but that was golden hour. Now we’re blue hour. So we have two different options and bugged about that fire pit. This is the perfect time for fire pits.

I need a lighter. Excuse me neighbor. Do you guys have a lighter by chance? Just try to turn on this fire pit for a shot. resourceful Behold El fuego. Oh, yeah Shoulder done that earlier. Thank you, sir.

You can’t tell me That doesn’t make all the difference. Yes sir So I’ve been filming for the past five hours time we get here Yeah, so been about five hours. I’ve been filming now And this is one of the great perks of the r5c is how light it is now I have this big old battery on here as well But I just compared it to the c70 that nates on and even with this big chunky battery that lasts six hours They were pretty much the same weight So I get to have six hours of battery life and I get to have a setup that’s light enough to go all day long Five hours straight without feeling too much fatigue So that’s one of the big perks of the R5C over the C70 and other cinema cameras is just how small of a package it is.

It comes in with battery at 27 ounces versus the C70 is 49 ounces with battery. So almost half the weight on the R5C. Now again, when you add an external battery, it’s gonna even it out pretty much. And as far as the battery life goes, we’ve been a little over five hours.

I haven’t turned the camera off the whole time just to test. And we are at 21% battery after five hours. So it will easily go six plus hours. Now without this, it can’t do raw 8K at 60 frames with electronic lens control.

It won’t give you control over the lens. So you can only do 30 frames per second at 8K raw without an external battery. So in order to do the shoot we did today, I had to have an external battery for that anyway.

The other thing to consider is that the LPE6 batteries last less than an hour per battery. So the battery life is not great on the R5C when using the LPE6 batteries. It’s still manageable, but I probably would have had to swap out four or five batteries during this shoot.

And when you have to take it off the gimbal and rebalance that can get old. So again, being able to run this whole shoot, never have to take the camera off was super awesome. So that’s how I would use the R5C.

And I honestly would use this for shoots like real estate over my C70 for all the perks that I mentioned today. And so though the C70 is my go -to, this is gonna start finding itself in a lot of my shoots as well now.

So that’s pretty much it for our real estate shoot. We’re now gonna take you back to the studio. I’m gonna show you how to work with these files in post. Okay, so here I have pulled up a raw R5C clip and be aware that 8K 60 frame per second raw takes up a lot of data.

50 minutes worth takes up one terabyte of storage. So if you do want that luxury of 8K raw, just make sure you’re ready to double your investment into hard drive space or be selective of when you push record.

But I wanna show you the power of raw. So let’s say I come across a clip that I forgot to change my white balance. is a tad underexposed. Now if you were to shoot this in a standard profile you could only stretch it so far without the image falling apart.

With RAW I can come up here to my source and I can edit the actual metadata of the clip. So first I can say let’s bring up the exposure to be better exposed for the room and we’re looking a little bit warm and green.

So let’s bring down our color temperature and up our tint just a tad and here’s the before and after and it now better matches the clips before and after it. And as far as my color grading process for these real estate videos all I have applied here is a neutral Canon Legacy C -Log 2 conversion LUT by Phantom and I’ll put a link in the description below and you can see the before and after of that conversion LUT.

But another benefit to shooting an 8k is that I can pull stills from this that are going to be 8K stills. So you’re gonna get a much sharper, much more crispy screen grab than if it was just 4K. Not to mention that the R5C is a hybrid camera so you can quickly switch over to photo mode and grab an actual CR3 RAW 8K photo.

So again, there’s just pros and cons to different camera systems and it depends on what your needs are and what’s most important to you. Now another question I get with real estate videos is what order should I film the house in and in what order should I put those clips in the edit?

Now personally, I like to edit as if I’m walking through the house, touring it. So I’d start at the front, I’d go in the main kitchen living area, then I’d walk to the primary room, then I’d go upstairs, go out on the deck and then eventually I’d head down to the basement and to the backyard.

So there you have an overview of how I create real estate videos. Again, if you’d like to learn more in detail, how I film, edit, do aerials, gimbal settings, make sure to check that out in the link in the description below.

But as far as my overall thoughts on the EOS R5C, it’s very similar to working with my EOS C70. The C70 is still my A camera for a lot of the shoots I do, but the R5C is a perfect B camera to a C70 and it will even be my preferred A camera on anything that I’m using, motorized gimbal because I prefer the lighter setup, the full frame sensor, so I can take advantage of the RF 15 to 35 millimeter lens.

Plus with those wider shots, I can now get more detail with that 8K resolution. So if you do a lot of gimbal work, love full frame sensors, want 8K resolution so you can punch in and still have a sharp 4K image or really need the photo hybrid capabilities, then this is a beast of a camera that will not disappoint.

As always, no camera has it all, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of the strengths and drawbacks to be aware of on the R5C. I’ll put a link below if you’re looking to pick one up. Well, that’s all I’ve got.

Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to subscribe for more content just like this. And if you have any further questions, please let me know. you you