Cinema EOS Announcement on 19th Jan - EOS R5C

[NorBro]

They are saving noticeable prosumer dynamic range improvements for the next generation when everyone is caught up with the displays (usually takes a few decades).

Resolution was always going to be the first priority because we came from digital cameras that looked like potatoes (delicious, nostalgic 1980s potatoes).

 

[Guest]

haha, can you post a picture of this 1980’s potatoe camera? i am not quite familiar with the reference.

 

[NorBro]

I actually mashed it into my own reference over the years.

I first saw/read something similar on YouTube in random comments sections probably like 10-15 years ago when people facetiously asked if a video "was shot on a potato" referring to the poor quality of an upload.

I don't question; I just say it looks like a potato.

 

[DLD]

Both ARRI and Red have had their ideas on how to improve the DR. ARRI's dual readout seems the most effective, albeit requiring the heaviest amount of calculations. That was occasionally problematic with the Classic a decade ago but, presumably, has been perfected since then,

In photography, exposure stacking is easier. And, regardless, 6-8 stops is good enough for my eyes. On my TV, I dialed back on the brightness anyway.

 

[Thomas Smet]

for me, 12mp is a nice effecient resolution for higher fidelity and better rendition of fine details. it has to be blown up pretty big to start seeing the steps in it, so i really enjoy it, and it is still not over kill for data maf processing. 8K is fun, but for now, it is reserved for special uses.

Technology can sometimes evolve all lopsided, and for photography and video, it is sad they went for reaolution first. but in a way, you could tell early on it was inevitable and we had to exhaust the resplutionwars to start getting more attention on the other aspects of image quality. the crazy thing is, so far there has been no end in sight for the resolution wars, it is absolute insanity!

we’vs gone from 12mp flagships to 50mp prosumer and our dynamic range numbers seem to have remained at 12stops since the F35. We’ve gone from iso800 being a touch noisy to iso20,000 being good. but we still can’t go from 12stops DR to 14 or 15! Every other aspect is doubling multiple times over, but we haven’t improve dynamic range hardly 10%

such a waste.

Completely agree. Same with TV technology. We keep farting around with 8k that no human will ever see an advantage of minus my daughter who has to stand right in front of and touch the screen when she watches Paw Patrol. Assuming some fool ever bothers to render Paw Patrol in 8k that is.

Instead we should focus on making HDR better. We should strive for better rec2020 color. Most TVs can barely scratch out 60-70% rec2020 color. The absolute best in the world even on a Flanders Scientific cannot reach 100% rec2020 color. Seeing that trickle down to consumers seems like a decade away. If we have HD and 4k as a strict standard the same should be true of brightness nits and rec2020 color. Manufacturers should not get to cut corners.

We all want more dynamic range in our cameras but without a delivery that can maintain that dynamic range it feels kind of pointless in a way really. It also feels rather odd we focus so much on color when we are forced to deliver to rec709 which frankly should be considered garbage at this point in the game. I may be exaggerating a bit but having worked with HDR now its really hard to go back. I love being able to shoot and maintain all the dynamic range and color the camera is capable of all the way to the delivery. To me its like shooting 4k to only delivery DVD. I feel like HDR is the future and now that we have reached solid 4k the resolution wars are rather pointless. We should now be aiming for less visual compression, rec2020, 10bit or even 12bit, 1000+ nits brightness as a no compromise industry standard and display technology not hobbled with things like dimming zones. HDR is supposed to be able to hit 10,000 nits which is laughable how far away we are from ever hitting that peak.

I'm currently using 500 nits for my HDR. Thats the limit of my TV plus it seems to be the clipping limit on the Canon R6 when shooting ISO 800 HDR PQ which is similar to the ISO needed for clog3. Lower ISO levels and I seem to clip around 250 nits. looks great on my XDR iPad Pro as well. I watch a lot of TV on my iPad Pro now. its only 2.7k but its 1600 nits and with my Air Pods Pro I get 3D spatial sound. The dimming zones are annoying at times but I have learned to mostly ignore them. One hell of a theatrical experience really. I'm hoping one day we get a Apple XDR TV. The first manufacture to stop farting around with HDR and treat it like a standard. Ironically XDR doesn't support rec2020 at all so even the mighty XDR is far from perfect. 100% P3 is pretty darn good however. Love or hate Apple but at least they are making an effort to get consumers into real HDR.

 

[Guest]

And, regardless, 6-8 stops is good enough for my eyes. On my TV, I dialed back on the brightness anyway.

If only dynamic range was called horsepower, i think people might start demanding it in future cameras.

12 horsepower? i’m sorry, i need 500.

 

[Guest]

We all want more dynamic range in our cameras but without a delivery that can maintain that dynamic range it feels kind of pointless in a way really.

You know it is not pointless.


If it were pointless, would film have ever improved it’s DR to a level higher than most digital cinema cameras today?

you have to consider it was most often displayed on paper and dim projectors in theaters, there was nothing close to HDR widely available, and yet film still reached something like 15+ stops eventually.

right now. the most tell tale sign of digital cameras is the lower dynamic range. much like the soap opera effect of 50-60fps, many people can feel the lack of dynamic range and recognize it as “digital” or “video” without knowing why.

 

[ahalpert]

A lot of photographers are cropping out more than 50% of their capture area in their final image. So sure, you may start with 24MP or 48, but you end up with 12 or 24. I'm guessing they don't really need more than 16 or 18 in their final image, if that. What you see online in websites is usually less than 8, sometimes less than 1. And since filmmakers don't typically crop their compositions for most applications...

 

[Guest]

A lot of photographers are cropping out more than 50% of their capture area in their final image. So sure, you may start with 24MP or 48, but you end up with 12 or 24. I'm guessing they don't really need more than 16 or 18 in their final image, if that. What you see online in websites is usually less than 8, sometimes less than 1. And since filmmakers don't typically crop their compositions for most applications...

right, fact is fact.

2K at most viewing traditional distances is enough, and for photography and the current state of digital media, most photographs are small frames that don’t take up the whole screen, but rather a small part of it.

That said, the advantages of 20mp-50mp is because there are few drawbacks to the extra resolution. The R5C is doing 60fps 8K, which is well beyond what people worried about back 2009. At that time buffers were slow, storage expensive. And so on. Today those are much less of an issue. However, dynamic range has been a sore point for digital to truly supplant as a film replacement, and it just hasn’t gotten there in 20+years.

film is dead, time for digital to stop being a toy.

 

[Guest]

i see a lot of people confuse the dynamic range captured by the camera as the need for displays to be HDR.

When you listen to a radio/spotify, do you listen to all of the instruments at their original volume?

In the same way, we don’t actually always want or need HDR to enjoy film or Alexa footage. They still look better, even on our standard definition standard dynamic range TV’s.


If we dvxusers can’t understand that, then it is no wonder only the Arri Alexa prioritized it, and why the cheap stuff is up to 200Megapixels.

 

[NorBro]

Most of the Alexa's final result comes from post. Needless to say it obviously has great DR, but nothing in Hollywood looks like how it looked on the Alexa's LCD/VF (I know you know that, just saying). They push and pull challenging scenes and the camera's response to that is what makes it what it is.

As far as the need for other displays, we of course don't need them right now to see the benefits of DR and better overall IQ because your simple point makes perfect sense that every person on the planet has seen the quality difference in film and high-end digital cameras on their monitors for the past half century+, but you have to consider that the Japanese and Apple and others might actually only be providing more dynamic range in the future through HDR and other [new] formats.

Maybe there's a reason DR hasn't improved much in 15 years (I know 1-2-3 stops is a lot but it's not as much as we hoped by now, at least definitely not in the last 5 years for the affordable cameras).

Thomas's post is challenging that notion like, "Okay, the increased dynamic range is starting to trickle in with these cameras in this specific pipeline (which are a work in progress), but how are we all going to get the most out of it?", so that makes sense.

We are in various worldwide technological transitions in several different ways and it's a mess. And so while we don't need them now, right this second, we might need them in the future, or whatever else they come up with, if we want to adapt and have the latest and best experiences.

 

[DLD]

If only dynamic range was called horsepower, i think people might start demanding it in future cameras.

12 horsepower? i’m sorry, i need 500.

It's more like, "You can get 300 but you want 500 ... just because".

And, btw, I crop stills all the time. Because I usually hate other people's framing and aspect ratios.

 

[Thomas Smet]

You know it is not pointless.


If it were pointless, would film have ever improved it’s DR to a level higher than most digital cinema cameras today?

you have to consider it was most often displayed on paper and dim projectors in theaters, there was nothing close to HDR widely available, and yet film still reached something like 15+ stops eventually.

right now. the most tell tale sign of digital cameras is the lower dynamic range. much like the soap opera effect of 50-60fps, many people can feel the lack of dynamic range and recognize it as “digital” or “video” without knowing why.

Of course it isn't pointless but we are not seeing what we should be seeing once delivered. HDR exists for a reason and its not just to sell new TVs.

The most telltale sign of digital cameras is not dynamic range. Its over processing. Its using electronic sharpness to make up for a lack of detail, its a ton of noise reduction applied to he image or gamma curves designed to make a high contrast punchy image. Its over the top image compression. Digital does not have to look like digital. A Canon DSLR could shoot professional still images with at best a 10-11 stop digital sensor. Award winning photos where nobody missed film anymore. I find it interesting how in the photography space digital has completely replaced film a long time ago with 10 stops or worse and yet in the video world thats somehow not enough.

Dynamic range is one aspect but tells us nothing of the rolloff. Thats why to many a 13 stop P4k looks better than a 15 stop Sony. Most are not even shooting the P4k for its optimal highlight range which is the very noisy ISO 1000. Even at ISO 100 the stops above middle gray are only 2 stops and to many it still looks more natural and its still a digital sensor. Dynamic range is a measurement and nothing more. We put way too much emphasis on that manufactured value as if it defines the entire image and it does not. Its like using a salt measurement scale to determine if food will taste good.

What Arri does is not so much about the DR as it is about the rolloff and how it handles over exposed colors where they fade in vibrance like they do on film. You can crush the lows and highs on Alexa material and it still looks less digital just due to the nature of how clean and natural the image itself is. Dynamic range has absolutely nothing to do with rolloff. Thats why a movie on film dumped to a VHS tape could still look more film like than video from a video camera.

I wish we could get rid of that stupid dynamic range measurement. Its not telling us what we think its telling us and its grossly misused. Its not even an accurate universal standard. Different tests can range from 11 stops to 14 stops for the same camera. It causes confusion and it kind of worthless really. What matters is how it looks and thats it. The number doesn't matter when people look at a video and just ask how many tops is it? If they have to ask it never really mattered. We seem to just want to know for bragging rights or to help us confirm we have a good camera.

I have felt for some time now there is normal dynamic range and then there is better dynamic range. Those are really the two values that matter the most to me now. Is it a normal range or is it better. That better could mean 12, 13, 14 or 15 stops. In every case they are all better and provide a lot of flexibility. I just don't lose sleep over I wish I had 13 stops instead of 12 stops. Even on the P4k I rarely ever want to shoot at ISO 1000 because it has a lot of noise. I just feel ISO 400 looks a lot better and that no longer has a ton of stops protecting the highs. I see a lot of people only think of DR as in protecting the highs but thats where the measurement becomes almost pointless. ISO 100 on the P4k is still 13 stops but its only 2 stops above middle gray. Instead of dynamic range every manufacturer needs to provide a chart like BMD does. Only then do we have an understanding of just whats going on with the DR. Every other camera is a darn mystery really. I think they keep it vague on purpose.

 

[Thomas Smet]

i see a lot of people confuse the dynamic range captured by the camera as the need for displays to be HDR.

When you listen to a radio/spotify, do you listen to all of the instruments at their original volume?

In the same way, we don’t actually always want or need HDR to enjoy film or Alexa footage. They still look better, even on our standard definition standard dynamic range TV’s.


If we dvxusers can’t understand that, then it is no wonder only the Arri Alexa prioritized it, and why the cheap stuff is up to 200Megapixels.

Of course we don't need HDR but it is the next evolution. We just discussed how resolution is less important than other image aspects. HDR is that image aspect. Rec709 sucks, 100 nits sucks. Sure we loved it for decades and I still love it but it can and should get better. SDR will still work wonderfully for many years to come but we now have a better solution and more people should start embracing it.

I started working with HDR and I love it. Its like having all the DR and colors I could ever want without having to mess around with log and trying to figure out what to sacrifice in the image. If you start with 15 stops at some point when you delivery you have to give up something. Unless you deliver ultra flat looking material which most consumers do not like at all. TVs are vibrant and punchy for a reason. HDR allows us to have normal contrast and vibrant colors while having every single ounce of color and dynamic range the camera sensors are capable of capturing.

Maybe thats subtle and not as needed but I think its more needed than 8k or 16k is. Even for my own family stuff I now only shoot HDR PQ on the R6. I no longer have to shoot log or deal with it in post. I shoot Her, edit HDR and deliver HDR that I watch on my Apply TV or iPad Pro. Its like shooting a normal standard camera profile without being stuck in 8bit rec709 color and 8-10 stops of DR. Its stunning and to me a game changer. My R6 only shoots up to 500 nits before it clips but thats still a lot of extra highlight detail vs shooting normal SDR on the R6. Most newer iPhone users can now watch HDR. iPad Pro XDR users (yeah I know a minority) can watch HDR. 14" and 16" M1 MBP users can watch HDR. All in a format only a handful of TV manufacturers manage at this point. A average of 1000 nits and 1600 nits peak is very rare. Most new TVs are some kind of HDR now and watching HDR content is getting easier. My M1 MBA encodes 10bit HEVC HDR from FCP insanely fast thanks to the M1 hardware decoder/encoder. If I record ProRes to my Ninja V a 22 second clip exports as 4k 10bit HDR in 16 seconds. Thats on my lowest end M1 MBA with the 7 core GPU. The newer M1 Pro and Max laptops are even faster. There really is no longer an excuse not to create HDR. Native HEVC files from the R6 take longer to encode to HEVC delivery but the higher end machines are much faster.

HDR is not like 3D where its a gimmick and needs special tools to enjoy it. HDR is the next evolution of what we watch. Like moving from B&W to color. Its in its infancy but its where we are heading.

 

[Tom Roper]

Of course we don't need HDR but it is the next evolution. ...HDR is that image aspect.... but we now have a better solution and more people should start embracing it.

I started working with HDR and I love it. There really is no longer an excuse not to create HDR. Native HEVC files from the R6 take longer to encode to HEVC delivery but the higher end machines are much faster.

HDR is not like 3D where its a gimmick and needs special tools to enjoy it. HDR is the next evolution of what we watch. Like moving from B&W to color. Its in its infancy but its where we are heading.

HDR is not in its infancy and it's popularity may have run it's course. I uploaded my first HDR video to YouTube 5 years ago and it wasn't new then, probably one of the oldest you can find on YouTube though. It got 38,000 views. I had been grading HDR before that for a Spanish film producer, as far back as Resolve 12.0 Beta. It seemed to reach it's zenith about the time Scott Wilkinson was doing his podcasts on AVS about it, and HDR was showing up in one of the two Dolby Vision Cinemas in the country. I saw my first, 'Everest' in Atlanta at the AMC Dolby Cinema in 2015.

I do like HDR and share your enthusiasm for it, but it's been out there. Rightly or wrongly, I think there is more excitement building for 8K judging by the number of 8K videos already showing up on YouTube. What's really needed is for YouTube to adopt 8K HDR which they have not yet done; your choice is one or the other at most, HDR or 8K support, but not both.

 

[Thomas Smet]

Does anyone know how to get the EV meter to work properly on a Canon camera with full manual lenses? Since it doesn't know the f stop it just sets it to 00 whatever that means and the exposure meter is way off. When shooting video with full manual lenses like cinema lenses the R6 has no exposure tools at all minus zebras. Thats a pretty big negative in my opinion and maybe something to think about for the R5c if one plans on using full manual lenses. There is a dinky histogram but it goes away once you hit record. I find the lack of tools kind of frustrating and annoying on Canon to be honest.

 

[NorBro]

With Canon, for that price, it's what you see is what you get.

R5 and R6 were the first hybrids to have zebras if you can believe that. In 2020.

Even the $6500 1DX Mark III has no zebras.

The difference with the R5 C is it's from the cinema department so it will have all of the exposure tools the cinema cameras have, including false color and waveform.

 

[Thomas Smet]

HDR is not in its infancy and it's popularity may have run it's course. I uploaded my first HDR video to YouTube 5 years ago and it wasn't new then, probably one of the oldest you can find on YouTube though. It got 38,000 views. I had been grading HDR before that for a Spanish film producer, as far back as Resolve 12.0 Beta. It seemed to reach it's zenith about the time Scott Wilkinson was doing his podcasts on AVS about it, and HDR was showing up in one of the two Dolby Vision Cinemas in the country. I saw my first, 'Everest' in Atlanta at the AMC Dolby Cinema in 2015.

I do like HDR and share your enthusiasm for it, but it's been out there. Rightly or wrongly, I think there is more excitement building for 8K judging by the number of 8K videos already showing up on YouTube. What's really needed is for YouTube to adopt 8K HDR which they have not yet done; your choice is one or the other at most, HDR or 8K support, but not both.

Yo are lucky you got to see it the right way. Most people have not which is why it has been slow t take off in my opinion. I blame the manufacturers. They wanted to push HDR before it was ready so they could sell more TVs. They hobbled the format before it really had a chance to shine. Plus the content was very limited for awhile. Thanks to streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Paramount + and Disney + that has really changed now. I watch more HDR content than I do SDR content. Well except when my daughter binge watches Paw Patrol. I don't think anyone really knew how to market it back then and it was impossible for consumers to really appreciate what it could be. The reason most consumers thought it was a gimmick is because most TVs people can actually afford has 200-400 of brightness at best. The informed ones knew to find reviews to find out the actual brightness level. Every TV be it 250 nits or 2500 nits slapped the same HDR label on the box and that unfortunately kind of ruined the buzz for HDR. Its hard to love HDR when viewed on a 250 nit TV or if a user doesn't even it it up correctly. Most likely bought a HDR TV, went home hooked it up and watched SDR content and thought it was a complete scam. If they did figure out how to turn on HDR and actually find true content that was HDR the crappy nits likely didn't make much of a difference either.

Instead of being a whiz bang new thing its more of just a standard now. Our streaming content will continue to move towards HDR and eventually it will be the norm. Even the details on HDR PQ on the Canon R6 are extremely vague and disappointing. Its like every company is dipping their toes into HDR but afraid to really promote or push its advantages. I have still to see any reviewer talk about grading HDR on the new XDR MBPs. Its just such an after thought of almost everyone and its sad. Every review talks about watching HDR movies.

 

[NorBro]

By the way, DVXusers, someone wanted to say hi...

I've never been much of a herper, but she's really cute.

 

[Guest]

With Canon, for that price, it's what you see is what you get.

R5 and R6 were the first hybrids to have zebras if you can believe that. In 2020.

Even the $6500 1DX Mark III has no zebras.

The difference with the R5 C is it's from the cinema department so it will have all of the exposure tools the cinema cameras have, including false color and waveform.

Yeah, i tried to talk with Canon Cine Eos tech support about adding exposure tools to the 1DC, and they shrugged it off like there was no way they were going to update anything on the 1DC. I’m surprised they took this long though.