Canon EOS c300

Look like scarlet will be about 10k for the brain only and $15k for it functional. It can do 4K! But yeah still has a small sensor like traditional video cameras so don't expect shallow DOF too much.I don't see the point in spending the money on either one of these. if you loaded go ahead and get a EPIC. If you are just starting out or into indie stuff it's much better to go the DSLR route. This in between cameras just can't justify there prices they should try to get them down to $3,000 since they are going up agaisnt $800 DSLRs.
 
Last edited:
IMHO, the C300 is an overpriced camera with only 8 bit SDI and HDMI outputs.
No competition with the PMW-F3 4:4:4 10 bit output.

From http://blog.abelcine.com/2011/11/03/canon-announces-new-c300-hd-camera/#more-14758

Today, Canon announced their new, much-anticipated Cinema EOS C300 video camera. Not long ago, we got a sneak peek; some of its key features are a Super 35mm size sensor, 12-stops of dynamic range, on-board 50 Mbps recording to CF cards and HD-SDI outputs. The camera comes in two versions, one with a Canon EF mount and the other with a PL mount. The sensor is 4K (3840 x 2160) in resolution, with a unique color pattern that produces a very clean 1920×1080 signal. From our brief testing of the camera, we could find no rolling shutter artifacts, moire issues, or other problems found on HDSLR camera sensors. The sensor has a native ISO of 850 and produces a clean signal all the way up to 20,000 ISO, giving amazing low light performance. And in the case that you have too much light, the camera also has built in ND filters. The body of the camera is something in-between a video camera and an SLR. It is light, compact and designed to be handheld, with a detachable hand grip that can control the camera. The unique design is very easy to hand hold, and I was impressed by how light the cameras was. The camera’s 4″ LCD screen and audio interfaces are also detachable. The LCD screen attachment can be positioned in many different locations and rotated for better viewing. It also features full menu control, audio control and two XLR inputs. The LCD unit connects to the camera with two cables, giving it a lot of placement flexibility. The rear of the camera also has a small LCD panel, which features camera status info such as frame rate, shutter and ISO. Dials on the back of the camera and hand grip can quickly switch through these settings.
The camera has two CF cards slots and records in the same format as the XF305 and 105 cameras. This is a 50 Mbps 422 8-bit MPEG2 compression. Video can be recorded to either card, or both at the same time for redundant recording. Video resolutions and frame rates include 1920×1080 at 23.98p, 29.97p and 59.94i fps. Additionally, a true 24p mode is available for those doing film outputs. In 1280×720 mode, frame rates from 1-60p are also available for slow motion. All of these signals can be sent out over HD-SDI or HDMI, which gives you an uncompressed 8-bit signal. The camera also has genlock, timcode, and LANC connections for multi-cam operation and remote control. A WiFi port is also available, and with an additional accessory you can control the camera with a tablet.
Internally, the camera has a host of impressive functions including full painting controls for scene files. Many different gamma modes are available including one that matches Canon’s HDSLR cameras, as well as a Canon Log mode for the most dynamic range (learn more about Canon Log here). Setting can be saved to an SD card, and moved between cameras. A waveform and vector scope are also built in for adjusting exposure and color.
Canon also has announced several new lenses that are geared for cinema use. These lenses have the same wide aperture as found in Canon’s L series still lenses, and will also come in their EF lens mount. They feature the smooth gearing that cinematographer demand for pulling focus and iris. Here are the three lenses announced, note the low T stop:

  • Canon Prime Lens 24mm T1.5
  • Canon Prime Lens 50mm T1.3
  • Canon Prime Lens 85mm T1.3
Canon’s zoom lenses announced at NAB will also be made available in EF mount. The zooms go from 14.5-60mm T2.6 and 30-300mm T2.95-T3.7 and should be available in the first quarter of next year.
The C300 is the first camera in Canon’s new Cinema EOS line, and I am excited to see what follows. The C300 EF and PL should be available in January with a list price around $20,000. More details will be posted on this blog in the future, and also check out Canon’s new Cinema EOS site.
 
I agree that the C300 is overpriced, but for some projects I would rent it over the F3 - if I couldn't afford S-log and any external recorder in the budget, I would rather work with the C300 recording 50mbps 4:2:2.
 
The SDI out is 10 bit 4:2:2. So if you can buy or rent an external recorder, that's a good thing with Canon log for grading.

Yeah, I might rent this camera out if my ordered Scarlet takes six months to deliver ( expect long delivery waits despite what they say - I'm sure they're completely swamped with orders).
Namely cause of the built in 4:2:2 codec, 8 bit or not, it gives me a little more color info without the need for a clunky external recorder.
 
Doctor Wu said:
The SDI out is 10 bit 4:2:2. So if you can buy or rent an external recorder, that's a good thing with Canon log for grading.

Yeah, I might rent this camera out if my ordered Scarlet takes six months to deliver ( expect long delivery waits despite what they say - I'm sure they're completely swamped with orders).
Namely cause of the built in 4:2:2 codec, 8 bit or not, it gives me a little more color info without the need for a clunky external recorder.
Click to expand...
Hi Doctor Wu,
I know that the built in codec is an 8 bit, but where did you see that the SDI output is 10 bit?
I didn't see anything about that in the official technical specs http://www.canoncinemaeos.com/products.php?type=Camera&model=C300 but a lot of reliable sites wrote that the outputs are 8 bit.
Canon secret!
:lipsrseal
 
Filippo Chiesa said:
Hi Doctor Wu,
I know that the built in codec is an 8 bit, but where did you see that the SDI output is 10 bit?
I didn't see anything about that in the official technical specs http://www.canoncinemaeos.com/products.php?type=Camera&model=C300 but a lot of reliable sites wrote that the outputs are 8 bit.

Output is 8 bit.
Canon secret!
:lipsrseal
Click to expand...

http://learn.usa.canon.com/resources/misc/cinemaEOS_faq.shtml
Is this camera 8-bit or 10-bit?
Digital conversion is done at 8-bits per channel.

Why 8-bit instead of 10-bit?
The video components within the EOS C300 camera are processed at 13-bit for Green and 12-bit each for Red and Blue. This allows excellent nonlinear processing of the video that ensures a superb tonal reproduction over the nominally exposed range (that is, from reference white down to capped black level). A contrast ration in excess of 500:1 is achieved. In addition this bit depth has sufficient overhead to handle overexposed signals. When the camera is set to 850 ISO and the Gamma transfer function is switched to Canon-Log an 800% overexposure is achieved – which translates to the camera being able to capture an Exposure Latitude of 12 f-stops.

The Red, Green, and Blue video signals are subsequently matriced to formulate the Luma video component and the two color difference signals according to the 4:2:2 coding structure preparatory to being compressed according to the MPEG-2 422Profile@High Level international standard. This standard firmly stipulates 8-bit. Accordingly, the fully processed 4:2:2 video components are transformed to an 8-bit depth before being sent to the compression engine. This process loses very little of the careful management of the nonlinear transfer function performed (as described above) at the higher bit depths.

The serial representation of the uncompressed 4:2:2 component set is structured from the parallel 8-bit component set and is fed to the camera's HD SDI interface allowing parallel outboard recording to be implemented if desired.
Click to expand...


I do, however, wonder if people are going a bit overboard on the 10-bit thing.

As a VFX guy, I firmly embrace the idea of 10-bit log.

However... I really think that people should wait for the footage before going nuts RE 8-bit vs 10-bit. They're being a bit silly and not knowing what they are talking about.

For example, I was working on a shot a few months ago for a really big budget movie. As in "hundreds of millions of dollars". Shot Alexa, etc. The artist working on the shot before me had mistakenly used an 8-bit only despill plugin for a big money greenscreen shot. On, like, step 2. So, the log footage (pre-grading) was being converted to 8-bit way too early.

I was like "oh s**t you've killed all of the detail, aaaah!"

Funny thing was... the plugin that we used did a better job than the 16-bit one, we had only two days to go to get the shot out... so in the end it was left in. I did a trick of copying some of the luma channel info from the 10-bit source, but it didn't make that much difference.

That shot is in the final trailer. Oh and one more thing - the version without any fixes from me... is one of the main images used in an Entertainment Weekly article on it. Looks damn good.

So yeah... I think the specs nerds should shut the hell up until someone gets an F3 and a C300, shoots them side by side, and sees which is better.

The sensor is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. And the C300's seems to be really good, to me.

If you were recording some sound... would you like a top of the range $2000 Schoeps or Sennheiser mic plugged into a 16-bit 44khz audio recorder... or a mid-range mic plugged into a 20-bit 96khz audio recorder?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Same old 1080p30, slightly less crappy codec, much better form factor. Sounds great. I'd absolutely pay $3500 for one. -.-
 
I believe I read it in two sources but can't remember where except for Phillip Bloom's blog:

http://philipbloom.net/2011/11/04/newcameras/

He states it's 10 bit SDI 4:2:2 which I'm pretty positive I've read elsewhere.

Filippo Chiesa said:
Hi Doctor Wu,
I know that the built in codec is an 8 bit, but where did you see that the SDI output is 10 bit?
I didn't see anything about that in the official technical specs http://www.canoncinemaeos.com/products.php?type=Camera&model=C300 but a lot of reliable sites wrote that the outputs are 8 bit.
Canon secret!
:lipsrseal
Click to expand...
 
Bruce,

I agree with you when you say that you're waiting to compare the F3 and the C 300 siderale by side, I will do it as soon as I can, but 8bit is bad for LOG (it's not only my opinion).
With a good Green back you can also use the 5D crappy codec and it works great.
I used the Alexa a lot of times and IMHO the 16 bit is much more better than the 8 bit one.

Cheers,

Filippo
 
Filippo Chiesa said:
Bruce,

I agree with you when you say that you're waiting to compare the F3 and the C 300 siderale by side, I will do it as soon as I can, but 8bit is bad for LOG (it's not only my opinion).
Click to expand...

Right - you and I know that 8bit for LOG feels... wrong. My first thought was WTF.

However, then I thought about it some more... Log is an inherently better distribution of values. For example, it is often agreed that 10 bit log equals or beats 12 bit linear. 8 bit log beats 8 bit non-log - so we're already a little bit ahead.

Also, how much real info did we have in 10-bit log?

Below 95 was "very very black".

Above 685 is reserved for specular highlights. Often there was detail in the 685-900 range, but rarely would we need to use all of the bit values there. Most of the time you'd end up with all of those pixels just representing some highlight data that formed the nice rolloff - eg represented as RGB values 245-255 when you made your trailer for the web :)

So, the key part was really that 95-685 area. Eg where the main image lives. And how many tone values do you have there? 685-95 = 590. Which is only 57% of the 0-1023 range.

Now with the C300, presumably you don't waste 10% of your tonal capture range for superblack. You don't need that leeway because you can see if stuff is clipping on the monitor. Unlike film, where you didn't see a damn thing until you got your dailies.

Similarly, you don't need 30% of your image to capture highlight detail. You can take that existing highlight detail and compress it with a slight knee. Not clip. Just compress - you don't need unnecessary bits spent there since you're probably going to be doing a knee there at some point. We don't need to know that the sun is brighter than the highlight on the aluminum cup.

So let's say at the end of it you are left with black values in the 0-24 range, tonal values from 25-224 or so for real detail, and tonal values from 225-255 for the extreme specular highlight info.

So you are spending 78% of your 0-255 budget on pixel values that are crucial to have smooth tones, whereas with traditional Log workflow, you're only spending 57% of your budget on those pixel values.

So the difference from 8-bit log shot well on Canon C300 to traditional 10-bit log is not really 256 vs 1024.

It could be more like "200 values" vs "590 values".

This is a pain of course. I am assuming here that you shoot in the log gamma mode, but leave the "cinema override" mode turned off so that you still have access to ISO, black level, knee controls at the same time as log recording... whereas if you could record true 10-bit you wouldn't have to worry so much.

Just thinking things through... what do you think?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Well, this was disappointing. I like my XF300, but adding an S35 front end and LOG isn't going to justify a $20K price tag in most people's eyes.
 
Spotlight Media said:
At $20k Canon will have a lot of these in stock at all times.
Click to expand...
The pricing is insane 20k for 1080P? Why don't they give us a DSLR with a headphone jack, XLR inputs, a decent on board codec and a clean hdmi out for a external recorder. I would pay at least $3,500 for that. But till then I will keep my Gh2 with 176mp avcintra setting and record my audio with a h4n.
 
This camera should have been called the Canon 5DmkIII and have a price point of 4k.
Sounds like a great camera but I think they are pricing themselves out of the market.
 
Honestly, I am certain that we will see some phenomal films shot on this camera. Thats what it boils down to. I wont be purchasing it, but I don't think it is a bad piece of gear.. I just disagree with the price. As Chaos123x said, "20k for 1080P?"... seriously? If I have 20k to spend on a camera, I would be much more inclined to go with something a bit more substantial.

Personally if I think about getting a new camera, I'm thinking about getting 3 of them. This is just way to expensive for the end result. Too many solid options out there. 5Dmk3 (ala AF100) would be a much better option at a sub 5k price point...
 
I think it's too early to tell. It's not going to be $20,000 street, and it's a pretty complete package right out of the box. I am intrigued by the way the sensor works. Vincent Laforet's post this morning hints at that...this isn't an impressive camera on paper but it is producing something amazing in the image. I'm betting we'll see it easily trading blows with the F3, taking the scarlet down in low-light, and in general, producing one of the best 1080p images we've seen to date. Too early to be sure, though, obviously.
 
Kellar42 said:
I think it's too early to tell. It's not going to be $20,000 street.
Click to expand...
You might be surprised. Historically Canon has held their dealers to 100% MSRP. There was no such thing as "street price" on the xlh1, for example. And yeah I know people will say it's price fixing etc; I'm not saying one way or the other, I don't know how they structure it with the dealers to make it legal, but that was how thy did it for a long, long time. I don't know if they still try to enforce that but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they did, seeing as this is their new flagship.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top