C300: C300 mkiii?

chris f said:
I gotta say, I'm pretty shocked that Canon looks to have finally done "the right thing" here with this camera. Non-crippled feature set, no concern of cannibalizing its existing cameras.
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I couldn’t believe it either. Seems they listened finally and learned.
 
Hello image makers,

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation from Canon to test out their canon c300 mk3 that was officially announced yesterday. This camera offers a really nice set of features with vastly improved dynamic range thanks their newly designed s35 size sensor with dual gain option. This camera lets you also shoot 120 fps without sensor cropping which is really nice. I am firm believer that the best way to try out any camera is to go out and make a short movie and that is exactly what we did. The final product is a nice little gem entitled Dear diary day 21. We also managed to make an overview of the 10 best features based on our hands on experience. From a red dragon owner point of view this is definitely a camera worth checking since they share many similarities but it seems that the canon c300 mk3 can be a bit more versatile. Feel free to follow the link to see the final movie and the 10 best canon c300 mk3 features overview. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. best D

https://youtu.be/VU6W40AS99M
 
cckid said:
Hello image makers,

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation from Canon to test out their canon c300 mk3 that was officially announced yesterday. This camera offers a really nice set of features with vastly improved dynamic range thanks their newly designed s35 size sensor with dual gain option. This camera lets you also shoot 120 fps without sensor cropping which is really nice. I am firm believer that the best way to try out any camera is to go out and make a short movie and that is exactly what we did. The final product is a nice little gem entitled Dear diary day 21. We also managed to make an overview of the 10 best features based on our hands on experience. From a red dragon owner point of view this is definitely a camera worth checking since they share many similarities but it seems that the canon c300 mk3 can be a bit more versatile. Feel free to follow the link to see the final movie and the 10 best canon c300 mk3 features overview. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. best D

https://youtu.be/VU6W40AS99M
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That is 1,000x better than Canon's official "ballerina on a junkyard plane" crap.
 
Great visuals, content & camera movement - but I hate to say that it looks like it's struggling a bit with dynamic range (and I know those lighting conditions are harsh).

[DR from the C500 I and C300 II have ingrained in my brain to just look for white blocks. At least this new model appears to be better though...as it should be.]
 
Run&Gun said:
That is 1,000x better than Canon's official "ballerina on a junkyard plane" crap.
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It's 1,000,000 times better than Atomos's "two guys are trying to kill each other with knives" S1H film.

PS. It may be a matter of taste but I might have used an ND on a couple of shots. Granted it shows off the dual gain sensor but nonetheless ...
 
Or pull some of that slightly overexposed RAW down in post. C200's CRL is pretty flexible so I don't doubt this could have been manipulated better.

But enough negativism - it's nice!
 
That video looks good.

This camera is looking like a camera to buy.

From now on whenever anyone addresses me, please refer to me as "Image maker."
 
Eric Coughlin said:
That video looks good.

This camera is looking like a camera to buy.

From now on whenever anyone addresses me, please refer to me as "Image maker."
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Agreed. Best demonstration of the C300mk3 I've seen so far. Here is a video of Drazen Stader, who shot the Dear diary day 21 short, talking about using the C300mk3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk1LKIGfrHE

Enjoy.
 
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puredrifting said:
Eric Coughlin said:
Well I probably spend around $1500 per year on hard drives (I typically fill up one 5 TB $120 Seagate drive per month; I'm not including the many 1 TB drives I buy and permanently ship and bill to clients for for footage delivery), shooting 4K 10 bit 4:2:2 at 400 mbps around 75% of the time and 1080p at 50 mbps perhaps 25% of the time. So if I shot say RAW lite at 4k at around 1000 mbps 100% of the time, my needed hard drive space would about triple, so an extra $3000 per year, or at 5.9k RAW at 2k mbps, that's six times the hard drive space, so $9000, $7500 more than my current spending.

Now, I keep backups for personal use (demo reels) and as a courtesy to clients. I've yet to have a client require a backup, and as such, I can't charge for it. These are freelance clients; they're editing it and they're responsible for backing it up. Which means, that $9000 (or $7500 extra) comes straight out of my pocket. And in 2020, $7500 is a lot of money to write off as a non-profitable business expense.

The only way it could really be profitable is if the quality increase in the footage leads to a $7500 increase in profits, which I'd be skeptical about, but of course depends on what type of work one does. But the point is, for the people (like myself) who still want the mid-range codec, it's because we don't think shooting RAW would lead to a worthwhile (in my case, at least $7500) increase in profit for our client base.


I actually haven't noticed much of a decrease in the cost of hard drives from 2018 to 2020, so I feel like RAW in 2018 is mostly the same as RAW in 2020. The Seagate 5 TB drives maybe went down in price $10-$20 (of the now $120 price) if my memory is serving me right. I guess solid state drives for faster transferring have gone down in price more, but they're still more expensive than non-solid state.
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You sound as if you shoot a LOT more footage than most and fair enough, it wouldn't probably yield good dividends for you. For those of us who don't shoot so much quantity of footage though, RAW is noticeably better quality, more "pusahable" in post. The differences in costs I was mentioning were in the media (CFast 2.0 cards are MUCH cheaper not than when we bought the C200, a bit different for CFExpress I am sure if you have a C500 MKII or probably the new C300 MKIII) and storage drives are much cheaper now, I've paid as little as $119.00 for 10TB Seagates on sale and Costco constantly has the 8TB versions for $119.00 or $129.00. That's definitely cheaper than they were when we bought the C200.

For shooters who don't ever edit their stuff or have specific clients who will work with RAW, obviously 400Mbps is better. But for those of us who edit at least some of their clients work and don't shoot metric tons of footage, I like it.
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Following up on this, the C300 Mark III offering 4K Long-GOP is actually really cool. The C300 Mark II only does Long-GOP at 1080 and not 4K, and whenever a client requests 1080, I shoot Long-GOP, which is always awesome to transfer the day's footage in a matter of minutes rather than an hour or hours. My clients never know enough about specs to ask for anything else and I feel Long-GOP is good enough for any 1080p client. Now with the Mark III, I can just about always shoot Long-GOP at less than half the data rate that I've been doing the many 4K C300 shoots I do.

Going back to hard drive spending at $1500 per year, if I can cut that in half to $750 per year by shooting mostly Long-GOP, over a five year camera cycle, that's $3750 in hard drive savings, as well as lots of time saved in memory dumping and time is money as well.

Since the camera has the capability, some clients may request RAWlite which would offset the savings some, but I don't think many of my clients would want RAWlite. I have Arris if a client or myself really wants quality, and Arri ProRes beats C-series RAWlite any day of the week.
 
cckid said:
https://youtu.be/VU6W40AS99M
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Thanks for sharing. It is really refreshing to see someone actually go and shoot something that isn't just test shots in a field, especially during these times. Was this shot raw or XF-AVC?

It could be the grading on all the tests I have seen, but the images look slightly more pastel with a red bias than the Canon C300 Mk2. I understand there are a lot of factors here, but the images have a different look than what I am used to seeing out of the C300. It looks great, don't get me wrong. I am more curious about matching to the C300ii or any of the other cinema cameras.

Jpeg2.jpgJpeg3.jpg
 
Eric Coughlin said:
Following up on this, the C300 Mark III offering 4K Long-GOP is actually really cool. The C300 Mark II only does Long-GOP at 1080 and not 4K, and whenever a client requests 1080, I shoot Long-GOP, which is always awesome to transfer the day's footage in a matter of minutes rather than an hour or hours. My clients never know enough about specs to ask for anything else and I feel Long-GOP is good enough for any 1080p client. Now with the Mark III, I can just about always shoot Long-GOP at less than half the data rate that I've been doing the many 4K C300 shoots I do.
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I agree. This is huge for handing all files to the client, especially if you're shooting Wide DR or any of the baked in color profiles.
 
DLD said:
It's 1,000,000 times better than Atomos's "two guys are trying to kill each other with knives" S1H film.

PS. It may be a matter of taste but I might have used an ND on a couple of shots. Granted it shows off the dual gain sensor but nonetheless ...
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Run&Gun said:
Maybe that will be my after-dinner entertainment tonight...
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Well... Besides looking almost like something belonging on the CW during the summer, it was STILL better than watching a single person ballet on an airplane wing. I think I'd rather watch YouTube cat video's before one more equipment company's dance video's.
 
The CVP guy mentioned how he doesn't/t like the audio controls placement..... I totally disagree. Canon found a good spot for audio.

When in short body, the operator is often shooting with the camera in front. As many C series users actually seem to like this about Canon.

In long body config, there are operator controls for audio on the addition unit.


To me, this makes film makers and ENG shooters taken care of.

DR is looking better than C3002. But still not exactly knocking anyone off their thrown.

Looks a nice incremental upgrade for some. Let's see in 6months how we feel about it. haha
 
chris f said:
The day has finally come!

I gotta say, I'm pretty shocked that Canon looks to have finally done "the right thing" here with this camera. Non-crippled feature set, no concern of cannibalizing its existing cameras.

Getting ready to watch some of the videos, but on paper this seems like its the camera I was dreaming about in post #1, but with even better features.

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Thanks, this one was the best one.

I am now realizing that all the slomo footage is not using DGO. Kind of ironic, in a way. C3003 introducing two aggressive features and you can only "either or". I suppose we'll have to think of it as high speed film, to justify the slight increase in noise.


If the C3003 is a stop better in the shadows than the C5002, at iso800, then that is really nice. In the "Tall Story" review video, they mention that it is supposed to have the "best highlight roll off of any C series". So, sounds promising.

https://vimeo.com/387358406
Good interview too.
 
cckid said:
This camera offers a really nice set of features with vastly improved dynamic range thanks their newly designed s35 size sensor with dual gain option. ... Feel free to follow the link to see the final movie and the 10 best canon c300 mk3 features overview. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. best D

https://youtu.be/VU6W40AS99M
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing. And some really nice stuff in there. Not to sound too critical - but for me personally, it looks like most of the outdoor shots were overexposed - or at least shadows brought up for skin tone exposure - which therefore has many highlights / blue skies totally blown out. Therefore, I'm not seeing more DR than other cameras, but actually what often looks like less... Is there any info left in some of the brightest parts of the image - to pull down in the grade - or is this simply how the camera was exposed on purpose?
 
James0b57 said:
The CVP guy mentioned how he doesn't/t like the audio controls placement..... I totally disagree. Canon found a good spot for audio.

When in short body, the operator is often shooting with the camera in front. As many C series users actually seem to like this about Canon.

In long body config, there are operator controls for audio on the addition unit.


To me, this makes film makers and ENG shooters taken care of.

DR is looking better than C3002. But still not exactly knocking anyone off their thrown.

Looks a nice incremental upgrade for some. Let's see in 6months how we feel about it. haha
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And let’s be honest, the audio controls on a camera aren’t really meant to be ridden while you’re shooting, anyway. Especially handheld/off-the-shoulder.
 
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