The opening montage for the 2009-10 season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live was shot using Canon's EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 7D digital SLR cameras. The concept behind the opening sequence was portraiture as the director and crew looked to capture “living” portraits of the city, the cast and the unique characters that make up the New York City nightlife.

The crew wanted to capture the city nightlife in as natural a look and setting as possible. This meant minimal additional lighting, and making those on-camera feel comfortable to act naturally. Their solution was the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and 7D cameras, whose low-light performance enabled the crew to shoot in predominantly ambient light without big lighting gear. The crew found it easy to covertly shoot around the city without drawing a crowd thanks to the cameras' small form factor.

Filming at night, cast members were shot in various New York City locations by a small crew. The entire segment was captured and edited in a week’s time, incorporating 30p footage from the 5D and 60p footage from the 7D, which was used for slow-motion segments.

The kit allowed the cast and crew to shoot in any location—from the Brooklyn Bridge, which has limited ambient light, to a dimly lit street corner, to a more controlled bar interior—using only an on-camera Litepanels MiniPlus for most of the exterior shots and two Kino Flo lights for an interior shot that required some illumination enhancement. The lack of heavy equipment allowed the crew to move around the city quickly and shoot in some tight spaces.

“We have seen a shift in HD video capture toward a simpler and easier HDSLR workflow, and now with the EOS 7D shooting in standard NTSC and PAL frame rates, customers are realizing an even easier HD video workflow, using some of the largest HD video image sensors on the market at a fraction of the cost of competitive equipment,” stated Yuichi Ishizuka, senior vice president and general manager, Consumer Imaging Group, Canon U.S.A.