Berlin to Beijing: filming an epic road trip with the Canon XA55

Of all the features available to German cinematographer Clemens Boecker on his Canon XA55 camcorder on his latest assignment, infrared mode was the one he least expected to use. "But when we stopped at a gas station in Russia," he recalls, "a guy came up to us and said, 'I have a bear. Do you want to see it?' I didn't have any lights on top of the camera at that moment, but the infrared mode allowed me to make the most of that surprising encounter."

The Canon XA55 proved to be the ideal choice numerous times on Clemens' latest trip with celebrity adventurer Joey Kelly, filming his journey across two continents for a prime time national TV show in Germany. Joey rose to fame as part of The Kelly Family, a family-based band that had great success in Europe and beyond in the 1990s and was known for travelling around in a double-decker bus.

"After Joey stopped making music, he became an endurance athlete, competing in triathlons and ultramarathons," explains Clemens. "Now he's a little older, he's looking for a different kind of challenge, so he came up with the idea of driving from Berlin to Beijing in his old Volkswagen T1 campervan. As if that wasn't challenging enough, he wanted to do the journey without taking any money."

Clemens has documented all of Joey's adventures to date, travelling to Africa, criss-crossing the United States, and walking across Germany on foot – twice. The trip from Berlin to Beijing would prove particularly intense, though, because Joey planned to visit as many capital cities as possible en route. This meant driving through Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China – in a vehicle over 60 years old.

"We were on the road for approximately 30 days," says Clemens. "They were long, 16-hour days too, most of that time spent driving. In the end we did nearly 13,000km with that old car."

A professional camcorder made for travel

Clemens has been a freelance cinematographer for 15 years. For the majority of his work, he uses a Canon EOS C300 (now succeeded by the Canon EOS C300 Mark III) as his main camera and a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV as a B-camera. But this assignment required a smaller, lighter, self-contained setup.

Delivering a superior Full HD image

The Canon XA55 is a 4K UHD camcorder, but Clemens recorded in Full HD at 50.00i, because that was a requirement of the TV station he was working for. But through its Over Sampling HD Processing, the Canon XA55 delivers a superior Full HD image from the 1.0-type CMOS sensor. "For the size of the camera and the sensor, the image quality is amazingly good," he says.

Clemens also found the Canon XA55's battery life impressive. "I knew from my experience with Canon camcorders that it would be. That was important, because we could only charge batteries in the car while we were driving."

Being constantly on the road made it vital to create a reliable backup routine too. "We had a laptop and three hard drives, and every other day we would back up footage to the duplicate drives and store them in different vehicles. We tried to send some home from Moscow, but we were told that no data is allowed to be sent out of Russia. So we sent one hard drive back with a car, which was picked up by a driver from Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia."

Finding a way to get the precious footage back to the production company might sound tricky, but the biggest challenge Clemens faced was fatigue. "Driving on Russian roads at night while being tired, that was really challenging – and very dangerous. The roads were generally in bad condition and pretty narrow too."

Add to that a chance meeting with a bear at a gas station, and the benefits of travelling with a compact, versatile pro camcorder become clear. And Clemens wouldn't have it any other way. In fact, he's already planning his next trip with Joey and the Canon XA55.