C100: Canon Log - does it do anything other than compress the data?

[AndreeOnline]

Took me awhile, but I see where you guys are coming from considering Stephen spelt it out. Well you guys with the c100 keep working on it and let us all know.

The thing is though, that it's the same issue for C300 owners as for C100.

It's the 8 bits, not 4:2:2 vs 4:2:0.

8 bit space give you 0-255 to work with, regardless of color precision.

 

[Noel Evans]

Well Andree I can confirm without falter the Canon Log on the C300 is a great tool and one I use on everything (stated before).

 

[Erik Naso]

Best pratice is try it for yourself. Get a couple gradeable Canon log clips from the C300 and grade it until it breaks. Then you know how good it is or isn't and if your comfortable with the results.
Specs are great but they dont tell the whole story.

 

[groveChuck]

Erik- great grabs and grades for a backlit location and a bounce (the Matthews board?).

Are you renting the C100? Considering buying? Testing?

 

[Erik Naso]

Erik- great grabs and grades for a backlit location and a bounce (the Matthews board?).

Are you renting the C100? Considering buying? Testing?

I rented the C100 for seven days and shot two spots with it. Nice camera. Great picture. For know I'm going to hold off buying a camera. I want to see what shakes out next year. Until then I want to get my hands on a couple of the new ones like the F5 and also the C300.

 

[jonnyh1968]

Erik, So the news shot was shot with a c100 (in log)? Do you remember where the skin tones and skin tones highlights were falling in IRE ? thanks.

 

[FFoxX]

The thing is though, that it's the same issue for C300 owners as for C100.

It's the 8 bits, not 4:2:2 vs 4:2:0.

8 bit space give you 0-255 to work with, regardless of color precision.

The MPEG2 and AVCHD codecs have their own internal quantization (in spatial frequency domain) upon the input 8 bit quantization. That influences handling of low input signals with random motion between frames, typicaly noise. In 24 Mb AVCHD codec it leads to so called "mosquito noise" which appears on middle tones especialy in C-Log shots. Noise in Wide DR shots looks more like grain, probably because it occupies more bits in codec input signal and thus is less degraded by codec quantization (which is nonlinear). Higher bitrate (even less efficient) codecs generaly handle low random signals better than lower bitrate (although more efficient) codecs, so the noise in XF recordings often looks better than noise in AVCHD recordings. On the other side, higher efficient codecs handle better linear motions and stronger signals, thus 24 Mb AVCHD recordings looks much better than 25 Mb HDV.