Here’s a nifty trick. An innocent little $20 remote that Canon has been selling since long before the 5DmII was even a twinkle in your mamma’s eye, built for nothing more than wirelessly triggering the shutter of generation after generation of Canon SLR’s, has a not so well known feature: starting and stopping video recordings on the 5DmII.

Whosawhatsits? Yeah, that’s right. And it works from a pretty good distance, too.

Not just any remote will work, though. It’s got to be that remote, the RC-5. That’s the one with the 2 second delay button. A very handy and cute idea intended to let the photographer be in the shot with his family for a change, but still give him time to pop the remote into his pocket. Cute, right? Well, cute gets all grown up now that it can also start the video recording mode on the 5DmII and rumor has it, the Canon 7D movie mode as well.

It is line of sight IR, so if you want to trigger it from behind the camera, you’ll have to get all fancy pants and mount a little mini bounce card or mirror if you’re outside. If you’re inside there’s a good chance it’ll just bounce off the walls. Kinda like you are doing now that you found out about this handy dandy, Mayor Clancy!

Same goes for triggering multiple 5D’s at the same time. As long as they can all see the IR signal you’re as golden as Bee Arthur!

There is one catch. I know, I know. There’s always a catch. If you’ve never used a remote with your 5DmII before, there’s a good chance you’ll excitedly tear open your package with the RC-5 remote, power on your camera, and start trying to trigger it. What’s that? It’s not working? Did you get a bad unit? Is the battery dead? Did Nice sell you a load of hokum? Nope. The catch is, you have to hit the AF*Drive button on the top of your camera, then roll the select dial on the back of the camera counter clockwise for two clicks. That’ll put the camera in remote ready mode and put a cute little icon of a remote on the top window just to the right of your ISO setting. Yeah. That’s it. That’s the whole catch. Not such a bad catch really.

Now that you can remotely start and stop the video recording mode on your 5dmII and fancy new 7D what sort of opportunities does that open for you? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Nice!

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