C300: C300 Mark II First Impressions

J

jcs

Veteran
First impressions of the C300 Mark II:

The Good


  • Autofocus and assisted manual focus so far is amazing. The best autofocus I've used. Even more amazing is it works on all Canon (camera-focus-controlled) EF lenses (tested on the 24-105 F4L and 24-70 F2.8 II, will test more soon). It makes a slight sound, similar to IS noise, but quieter. If using an on-camera mic for run & gun, the noise can be picked up (in a quiet room), however I think with a suspended mic mount the noise shouldn't be audible. No issue at all with a boom or lav. Assisted manual focus helps with 4K critical focus.
  • Color is excellent, as expected. Favorite out-of-camera look so far with: Gamma: Canon Log, Color Space: DCI-P3 (or BT.709), Color Matrix: EOS Standard. Adobe CC doesn't have LUTs yet for the C300 II. One of the reasons for using a C300 II is to get excellent color out of camera with minimal work in post- no LUTs need with those settings (just curves, etc.).
  • Audio is excellent with options for 24- as well as 16-bit.
  • So far in the studio (and my desk) the image is very clean, with no visible recording artifacts (even at 50Mbps LGOP 422 10-bit (limited motion)).
  • CFast 2.0 cards copy very fast to the computer over USB3: 300+MB/s to an SSD.

Additional Observations


  • Compared to DSLR-sized cameras, it's huge and heavy.
  • The top handle, external monitor and mic assembly, and side handle can all be removed to make a smaller package, though it's still relatively heavy compared to DSLRs.
  • 4K is 410Mbps: the files are ALL-I and are huge (compared to the 50Mbps files we're used to with DSLRs, and 24Mbps files from the FS700). There is no long GOP option for smaller files. It appears Canon's processor(s) aren't powerful enough to handle long GOP for 4K.
  • Premiere CC 2015 (latest) can't handle the new Canon XFAVC files very well (4K and 1080p). Playback is slow and choppy, even at 1/2 playback resolution (might also be a 24-bit 4-track audio issue, testing this). Adobe is offering 1 year of Creative Cloud for C300 II owners, perhaps they'll update Premiere soon to fully support C300 II XFAVC files. Note that I found similar issues when writing the Photon app for 10-bit H.264 support: Premiere ran slowly on those files (sometimes with errors decoding).
  • The A7S II with my tweaked settings look pretty good next to the C300 II in 1080p. In 4K the A7S II has lots of macroblocks/artifacts, the C300 II is clean (with 4x larger files). The A7S II makes a nice B/super-low light camera to the C300 II.
  • 1080p60 slomo looks decent, likely as it's supersampled from 4K. 120p is clearly lower resolution being a center crop without the benefit of supersampling (which also helps reduce noise and aliasing). 120p on the A7S II looks better.
 
Premiere Pro CC 2015 can handle 1080p C300 II files in a 1080p Sequence just fine, at full playback resolution. I was testing 4K and 1080p in a 4K Sequence previously. Hopefully Adobe can improve 4K sequence performance: with a GTX980ti and pulling files from a Samsung Pro 850 SSD, 4K editing should be butter smooth. If the compressed H.264 data gets copied across the bus into GPU memory, as long as everything stays in GPU memory everything should run very fast. If they are shuffling data back and forth across the bus, that would explain the low 4K performance (didn't benchmark it, but the latest version of CC seems slower than prior versions for 4K).

Rolling shutter is very low on the C300 II- even without a shoulder rig, the unstablized 24-70 F2.8 II looks decent handheld (the camera mass helps too).
 
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Great to hear your first impressions. Can you do a simple high ISO comparison test between this and the original C300? Does it work well with FCPX?
 
I just got mine yesterday... took it out the box and shot some test footage in my back yard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-MkhvV00oc&feature=youtu.be

Observations:

• Having come from a c100, the camera is significantly more weignt, but not too much that I couldnt see myself handholding on a regular shoot day.

• Autofocus has NOT been as good as the c100. This is the biggest dissappointment for me. I've only been using my 50mm L f1.2 lens, but facial recognition has been pretty much unusable and even the regular autofocus seemed to work better in the c100. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Hoping this is user error.

• Love, love, love having slow motion again! C100 was missing it. The footage above was shot in 60p, but even at 120p I thought it looked good, although I noticed more a more video-ish look in clipped highlights in the 120p mode compared to the footage above which feels more filmic to me when overexposed.

• Had no issues editing this footage in Premiere on a 2 year old mac laptop. Tried editing in 4k and it was a little choppy, but not too bad.

• Had tons of room in color correction to push/pull exposure in 10 bit. Coming from an 8 bit camera, this is HUGE.

• Saw some real odd noise when shooting a test in my studio of an actor wearing a bright green t shirt. Not sure what that was, but concerns me for greenscreen work.

• Love the image I'm getting so far


Just some quick thoughts
 
Yes... it does. I heard this too, so called Canon to clarify before I got my camera.

There are three main modes to the camera when it comes to speed - Normal, Slow & Quick and Slow and Quick Cropped.

The Canon rep told me the slow and quick and slow and quick crop modes do not give you autofocus, but the normal mode does. The normal mode gives you 60p, but you have to interperet the footage to 24p in your timeline, which is no big deal - same thing we've done with the 5D. Slow and quick modes do the conversion in camera.

I was using the normal mode for the test above and definately saw the autofocus working... albeit poorly.
 
The face detection may not work when the head is turned away. The AF is for the central 80% and your child was offcentre a lot of times. And if the subject is in poor light and the background is bright, then I guess the focus may be off. You may also check about Speed of AF acquisition setting. Yours seems to be set at slow.
 
I've wondered whether you can even expect the AF to work when shooting with that small of a depth of field. I don't have a camera with DPAF, so I've never been able to test myself. Can you usually expect the AF to work at f/1.2?
 
I don't have access to the C300 I, I can test with FCPX.

I've read other comments about strange noise on the C300 II- I haven't seen any yet. There is a new firmware scheduled for later this month, though only noted so far for skipped frames in slomo: http://canoncanada.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/50862
This is our first Canon Cinema/Pro camera and from what I've read, Canon is very good in supporting their Pro line. If there are noise issues, Canon will likely fix them quickly.

I'll try AF with the 85 1.2, 135 2.0, 50 1.4, and 70-200 2.8 II.
 
AF set to face priority, looking mostly straight at the camera, sometimes only eyes/nose visible due to focal length. Zooms tested at multiple focal lengths. All lenses tested at max aperture (extra tests with 1.4 and 1.2 stopped down).

  • 16-35 F2.8L II
  • 24-70 F2.8L II
  • 24-105 F4L
  • 50 F1.4
  • 85 F1.2L
  • 135 F2L
  • 70-200 F2.8L II

Excellent results on all lenses, though some are quieter or faster than others (50 1.4 and 85 1.2L were the loudest and slowest (stopping down helped a little), 135 F2 the quietest and fastest). Will set up a test in the studio with a boom mic (and perhaps a lav too) to see if focus noise is an issue (without having to filter in post). The autofocus full blur to full focus rack zoom is a cool effect.
 
  • FCPX on a late 2013 MBP 15" Retina can play the 4K XF-AVC files in smooth real-time directly from an Atomos CFast reader and SanDisk 128GB Extreme Pro CFast 2.0 515MB/s card.
  • Premiere Pro CC 2015 with the same hardware and clip can play in real-time with 1/2 Playback resolution, but not as smoothly as FCPX.
  • Resolve 11 Lite on the GTI 980ti, Windows 10, 4K display, plays 4K XF-AVC fluid real-time, full resolution with a couple nodes and LUTs (would expect many more nodes could be used with the 980ti before slowdown).

Hopefully the next version of Premiere Pro CC will have full 4K playback support (looks like a video engine issue and not specifically related to XF-AVC 4K files).
 
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