C300: Canon firmwire update for C300 mk II, C100 mk II and then some

Eric Coughlin said:
Or more like the bane of "modern storytelling." I've seen some talented videographers producer well lit, well shot, well told...slow motion, that is as boring as heck because it's all in slow motion. "Let's just shoot all the b-roll in slow motion because it looks cool and the client [who doesn't know any better] loves it." I've heard that said one too many times before. It's a matter of, now that low and mid range productions can afford good looking slow motion, they think they have to use it, so it gets way overused. Same thing with drone shots, shallow depth of field, timelapses, and various other fads that have come and gone over the years. I'm glad to see the timelapse fad (gimmick) fading away over the last year or two, as well as the shallow depth of field fad, and as time goes on the slow motion fad and the drone fad will become less popular as time progresses as well.

Meanwhile, the high end market which knows better that has for a long time had access to all these tools is doing what the high end market always does, use them sparingly and only in the right circumstances.

Back when the FS700 came out, it was mainly used as a slow-motion camera, so anyone who had it as their A-camera was often shooting the majority of their footage in slow motion. So if someone had an FS700, you could guess their work might be sub-par work because of the excess of slow motion they'd use. After-all, they just spent $8k because they valued slow motion capabilities over image quality.

It's like giving a gun to a baby. A gun is a useful tool in many situations, but don't give a baby a gun, and don't give low end to mid range videographers slow motion if they don't know when to use it, as they might shoot themself in the face.

Of course I'm not saying it's not a useful tool to have when you actually do need it.
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I took the liberty of looking at your vimeo page and I'm not surprised that no one has asked you for 4k60p. You should understand though that personal/creative choices aside, the higher you climb up the commercial ladder the more convoluted and political things get in terms of requirements(formats, codecs, resolution, frame rates, etc). In other words, it becomes less about personal choice. I have stated this before and I will state it again, of the last 2 dozen projects I've worked on, not a single one was without some type of over cranking.

Most dp's & camera operators remain a slave to client / creative demands & industry standards. Shoot sports, music videos, promotional material, stock footage, VFX, NEED it! Shoot wildlife, documentaries, it's a damn nice tool to have.

You are boxing yourself into a very narrow minded way of thinking with that "giving a baby a gun" analogy. I completely disagree with it and considering the fact that cameras have been able to shoot 60p in 4K since 2007 there is no reason that a camera released 7 years later @ such a price point cannot accomplish the same. To add insult to injury, 4k60p has become a standard in cameras @ 1/4 the price point and Canon refusing to acknowledge this is not a smart move. It frustrates many of us whom see the mk II as the perfect camera but require 4k60p on a regular basis.
 
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I think Canon is fence sitting on two potential hurdles or milestones depending on how you look at them.

First, the UHD Spec has not been solidified yet, at least not for the North American television market. 4K, DCI, UHD, HDR etc... all of these new technologies and workflows are up in the air and everyone is vying for the standard bearer for broadcast. That being said broadcast itself is in total flux since the consumer end is moving quite fast too and we are getting much better screens in our living rooms.

As a C300 mkII owner I have discovered that there is inherently a ton of power in the camera and clearly 50% of it not being tapped into. We've seen this pattern with canon over time. Its nothing new, those who love things like DAF tend to live with it as a price for having another great technology. Plus the C series cameras are joys to work with.

That all being said when you have a dual CFAST 2.0 engine and the processing power they have loaded into the 300mkii there is most likely someone sitting in a lab somewhere trying to re-write firmware and machine code to get the camera to process 4K 60P without the camera overheating and burning the user.

Canon always has a long R&D pipeline but it doesn't take a genius to realize they got caught with their competitive pants down by sony when the FS7 and A7S2, A7R2, FS5 etc... all rolled out with the features everyone had been clamoring for all wrapped up in a sub-10k price point.

Given that last year at NAB there was all of two C300mkII prototypes on the floor i'm taking a stab that they loaded whatever they had in the R&D pipeline into a body and set it to ship as soon as it was stable enough to run UHD, DCI and some form of 120p slow motion without overheating - and i mean scalding someone. I own a red and those things get hot, but when the software in the camera is not up to snuff it will actually burn you.

So most likely given that the chips in the camera heat up, and despite the sensor and supporting tech already being fast enough todo the readout, its the processing tax on the rest of the hardware that most likely canon still hasn't worked through yet.

Canon has made the C300 series cameras a staple in television production, especially for doc, news and reality tv. They are bleeding to sony badly and when you have canon loyalists like Philip Bloom now with a major north american broadcast cable show leaving his C300 for Sony and now Panasonic getting back in the ring I don't think Canon will ignore the one area they dominate the market.

That is if the UHD spec for North American Broadcast becomes 4K 60P. We don't really know yet.

The way i see it is this:

If the spec lands on 2160p30 UHD broadcast/digital/tv - canon will do nothing and we will just have to deal.
If the spec lands on 2160p60 UHD for broadcast and digital tv canon will absolutely put the team that sits working to extract more out of the cameras processing capability will be working double time to get it up to spec.

Simple reason being is that as things move towards a new broadcast delivery spec the manufacturers that meet that spec will be the ones who get their ecosystems adopted.

Sony took a backseat to canon while reality tv moved to super 35 interchangeable lens like the c300. Then they got in the game hard and created an amazing ecosystem.

Dont ge me wrong. I personally owned an F5, FS7, A7S, A7S2 and still own a little baby 4K point and shoot they make which i love. But at the end of the day the usability and overall image quality plus the magical autofocus pushed me back into canons arms.

Time will tell.

Bottom line is all this stuff is getting so good and so cheap, best thing is to worry about is who your clients are (if any, maybe you are just a content creator), what they need and focus on making it compelling and great.

But in the meantime i am personally excited about Dual Pixel and the Cn7 being able to play together. That is what i was banking on.
 
The staggered product releases are very typical for the Japanese companies that control pretty much the entire consumer/low end pro photo-video market. One could see it with the GH4 - a year long pause - then A7RII/SII. Sony's been playing nice with Canon on the 1DX line. From a purely technological angle, they could have had an A9/A99II high end 4K DSLR style camera out a year ago.

PS. The heat issue is likely to be mitigated by the new generation of more power efficient 14 nM processors (soon to be 10 nM) but there's enough space in C300 to make a 60 fps 4K camera (the broadcast specs will probably call for 120).
 
Eric Coughlin said:
Or more like the bane of "modern storytelling." I've seen some talented videographers producer well lit, well shot, well told...slow motion, that is as boring as heck because it's all in slow motion. "Let's just shoot all the b-roll in slow motion because it looks cool and the client [who doesn't know any better] loves it." I've heard that said one too many times before. It's a matter of, now that low and mid range productions can afford good looking slow motion, they think they have to use it, so it gets way overused. Same thing with drone shots, shallow depth of field, timelapses, and various other fads that have come and gone over the years. I'm glad to see the timelapse fad (gimmick) fading away over the last year or two, as well as the shallow depth of field fad, and as time goes on the slow motion fad and the drone fad will become less popular as time progresses as well.

Meanwhile, the high end market which knows better that has for a long time had access to all these tools is doing what the high end market always does, use them sparingly and only in the right circumstances.

Back when the FS700 came out, it was mainly used as a slow-motion camera, so anyone who had it as their A-camera was often shooting the majority of their footage in slow motion. So if someone had an FS700, you could guess their work might be sub-par work because of the excess of slow motion they'd use. After-all, they just spent $8k because they valued slow motion capabilities over image quality.

It's like giving a gun to a baby. A gun is a useful tool in many situations, but don't give a baby a gun, and don't give low end to mid range videographers slow motion if they don't know when to use it, as they might shoot themself in the face.

Of course I'm not saying it's not a useful tool to have when you actually do need it.
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Some people could say the same about the steadicam.
 
You could say the same of any tool, that it can be overused. I don't think Steadicam gets overused as much in today's lower end video market as slow motion does, though. To put it one way, I see Steadicam used on high end movies and TV a lot more than I see slow motion being used there, while I can't say the same of low end productions which are currently using slow motion more often than Steadicam.

Let's consider IMDB credits from some of the top boxoffice movies right now...

The Jungle Book: Roberto De Angelis ... camera operator: "A" Camera/Steadicam Operator
The Huntsmen: Winter's War: Stamos Triantafyllos ... 2nd unit c camera/steadicam
Zootopia: Animated movie, so yeah.
Barbershop: The Next Cut: No credited Steadicam
The Boss: Christopher TJ McGuire ... A: Camera / Steadicam Operator
Batman v Superman: Andy Leo ... additional camera operator / steadicam
Criminal: Jason Ewart ... b camera operator / steadicam operator
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2: Keith Murphy ... 'a' camera operator: steadicam
Compadres: Lower budget movie, no Steadicam operator listed
Eye in the Sky: James Frater ... steadicam operator: camera operator: "b" camera

So let's say we don't count Zootopia since it's animated, 7 out of 9 of the top boxoffice movies currently out had a credited Steadicam operator. What percentage of those movies used 4K 60p or higher? I'd guess less than 7 out of 9.

And of those movies that did use slow motion, such as Batman v Superman (directed by slow motion lover Zack Snyder), even that used slow motion sparingly for a brief part of a scene or two from what I remember, unlike many lower end corporate videos where 100% of the b-roll is all slow motion. Are there any Academy Award winning documentaries where 100% of the b-roll is slow motion?
 
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Lots of documentaries, commercials, adventure shows, corporate work use slow motion to great effect and its a fantastic tool to have and can add greatly to story telling.

If your shooting narrative then slow mo doesn't matter to you but when your clients ask for it you need to be able to deliver. My clients ask for it and I need to be able to provide.
 
I'm just curious, how are you guys coming to the conclusion that the C300m2 CAN do 4k60p but won't because of a firmware limitation? Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to be true, and would even consider a paid firmware update to enable 4k60p.. I'd ditch my FS7 in a heartbeat. I shoot 4k slo-mo all the time, and it's just about the only reason why I haven't taken the plunge with the C300m2 yet. Hell, I still might get it and keep the FS7 as my slo-mo camera.
 
In the C300 mark 2 1080p and 2K are downsampled from 4K exept for 120 fps. 1080 and 2K 60 fps are downsampled from 4K so it must be a way for the C300 Mark 2 to record 4K 60p internally. Maybe it might even be easier to record 4K 60p than 1080 60p.

If a video camera like URSA Mini or Kinefinity TERRA can do it in RAW and in Prores, an EOS C must be able to do it too (!!!). Maybe Canon don't control their new XF-AVC completely yet (or it is a firmware limitation ...).
 
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Michel Talaïa said:
In the C300 mark 2 1080p and 2K are downsampled from 4K exept for 120 fps. 1080 and 2K 60 fps are downsampled from 4K so it must be a way for the C300 Mark 2 to record 4K 60p internally. Maybe it might even be easier to record 4K 60p than 1080 60p.

If a video camera like URSA Mini or Kinefinity TERRA can do it in RAW and in Prores, an EOS C must be able to do it too (!!!). Maybe Canon don't control their new XF-AVC completely yet (or it is a firmware limitation ...).
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Makes sense re: readout speed. I suppose it comes down to data rate, then. If the C300m2 keeps the same per-frame data rate of 410mb/s at 30p, The camera would have to put through 820mb/s at 60p. Though I suppose they could make a 410bps 60p, sacrificing per-frame data. Not like 410bps is particularly low.

For reference: the FS7 maintains a consistent per-frame data rate in 4k (about 10mb/frame, for 600mb/s at 60p and 240mb/s at 24p). It's not a bad approach, because there's no quality loss when changing frame rate, but no quality gain for staying in standard speed either.

I guess the real question mark is whether Canon would do something like that. Allow 4k60p. There's no historical precedent to my knowledge that they will enable such a huge functionality for free. There was DAF back in the C300m1 days, but that was a paid upgrade.
 
Just attempted to update the firmware, did all as instructed, no completed message came up, the camera switched off and the card and tally lights stay on, nothing works or operates!! What the f*** have you done Canon!!!
 
Michel Talaïa said:
1080 and 2K 60 fps are downsampled from 4K so it must be a way for the C300 Mark 2 to record 4K 60p internally. Maybe it might even be easier to record 4K 60p than 1080 60p.
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Keep in mind the camera also can't do 2K 12 Bit 444 in 60P, so there must be some hardware limitation as I can't see them purposely limiting that, as people are suggesting they may have for the 4K 60P.

I don't see them stunting a product that dramatically on purpose. 60P 4K is becoming a tier 1 requirement for a lot of networks and that's keeping a lot of people from shooting Mark II.
 
Macaholic said:
60P 4K is becoming a tier 1 requirement for a lot of networks and that's keeping a lot of people from shooting Mark II.
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The C300 MKIII will be here in ~2.5 years and it will have 4k60p, and there still won't be any 4K broadcasts (other than tests).
 
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Matt Turner said:
The C300 MKIII will be here in ~2.5 years and it will have 4k60p, and there still won't be any 4K broadcasts (other than tests).
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100% totally true. But that doesn't stop these networks from requiring it on productions shooting today.

Same mentality of having all Netflix original series shoot 4096 instead of 3840...ugh...
 
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