C300: Favorite ready to edit Camera profile?

[Mark Smith]

I should have made this clearer in my original post- This is about C300 Mk2 not the Mk 1.

My question to the list is what ready to edit camera profiles do you like these days ? Its always good to have a few different favorites to choose from. What is your go to Camera profile for files that are ready to edit with minimal grading?
I've bounced around between a few and sometimes it depends on what the B camera is, if there is one.
Having been burned a bit by shooting log and then the client does a minimal or sub-minimal grade on the footage even though shooting log was discussed at the outset, I decided I needed to have a really solid camera profile at the ready to jump to if there didn't seem like there was going to be a post grade in the cards.

One that I found which made me happy color wise and flesh tome wise was EOS gamma, Bt2020 Color space, production camera matrix. An alternate to that would be to substitute Wide DR for the EOS setting which of course is a lower contrast look.

The thing I like about my first preference is that the camera sees a scene pretty close to the way my eye sees it, which is a great place to start from. I feel like I can hand off these files and feel comfortable that an editor can do their work and the result will be close to what I intended with minimal grading effort.

 

[Run&Gun]

My go-to on my C300 is the EOS Standard. It's contrasty, has good punch and pop in the colors and skin tones look great. Pretty much the exact opposite of the current style I see on TV today, especially commercials. I can't stand this "color tinted, milky washed-out/full-screen flare" look that seems to be all the rage right now.

Unless you really mess something up, when using EOS Standard it's ready to air straight out of the camera.

 

[Mark Smith]

EOS Gamma

EOS Gamma

My go-to on my C300 is the EOS Standard. It's contrasty, has good punch and pop in the colors and skin tones look great. Pretty much the exact opposite of the current style I see on TV today, especially commercials. I can't stand this "color tinted, milky washed-out/full-screen flare" look that seems to be all the rage right now.

Unless you really mess something up, when using EOS Standard it's ready to air straight out of the camera.

I like the EOS Gamma for its contrast and punch though DR is limited compared to C Log. Most of the time DR and slavish attention to milking the last nth bit of detail out of it is over rated in my book. EOS standard matrix is too candy colored for my taste unless you dial back saturation which is totally possible inside the settings.

 

[puredrifting]

I would strongly suggest the two of you check out the Abel Cine EOS Match. EOS Standard looks like a bad cartoon to me, it makes your expensive EOS Cinema camera look like a 5D MKII. This Abel tweak of the matrix looks much better to me, tones down those garish colors a bit but still keeps it contrasty. I like WDR personally and use it a lot but if I get a C300 MKII, Cine Log 2 seems to be what I end up using a lot when I rent the camera. http://blog.abelcine.com/2012/03/23/canon-c300-scene-files-from-abelcine/

 

[nyvz]

Seems like WideDR is the way to go, though I mostly used C300s before that existed and have always been partial to C-LOG with the black pedestal brought to zero-ish with a hint of plus blue and minus red in the pedestal for extra skin tone color separation. My understanding is every other gamma curve throws away dynamic range in the highlights and is pretty much worthless...

 

[Plexi Head]

I shoot for a lifestyle television show (lots of outdoors, colour and movement) that requires me to shoot 50i and they like the vision to look like typical television XDCAM. The closest I can can get to broadcast ready XDCAM is Gamma: Normal 3 (BT 709) - Colour Space: BT.709 and Colour Matrix: Video. It actually works really well. The Colour Matrix 'video' setting is the key to out of the box colour for interlaced broadcast.

 

[Run&Gun]

I would strongly suggest the two of you check out the Abel Cine EOS Match. EOS Standard looks like a bad cartoon to me, it makes your expensive EOS Cinema camera look like a 5D MKII. This Abel tweak of the matrix looks much better to me, tones down those garish colors a bit but still keeps it contrasty. I like WDR personally and use it a lot but if I get a C300 MKII, Cine Log 2 seems to be what I end up using a lot when I rent the camera. http://blog.abelcine.com/2012/03/23/canon-c300-scene-files-from-abelcine/

I actually have to "de-tune" my 5D to match the 300 in EOS Standard. The vast majority of my shoots with it are sit-downs where I'm in complete, or almost complete control of the lighting and everything else. I'm usually sensitive to "cartoon" colors, because, well, they look bad. But I've gravitated to that scene file since almost the beginning. I used to shoot with a guy who had his VariCam set to "poster". It was horrible, but he loved it. I don't know how they let him shoot with it for all of those years.

 

[puredrifting]

I actually have to "de-tune" my 5D to match the 300 in EOS Standard. The vast majority of my shoots with it are sit-downs where I'm in complete, or almost complete control of the lighting and everything else. I'm usually sensitive to "cartoon" colors, because, well, they look bad. But I've gravitated to that scene file since almost the beginning. I used to shoot with a guy who had his VariCam set to "poster". It was horrible, but he loved it. I don't know how they let him shoot with it for all of those years.

Ha, ha, well we all do see things differently. I just recall trying out EOS Standard when I bought my C300 and hating the colors but different strokes. I too prefer WDR for all stuff where I have little to no lighting control and for lit scenes, I use my own tuned version of Abel Cine EOS Match that to me and our clients, looks better than EOS Standard. Poster, huh? Yikes.

 

[Mark Smith]

Ha, ha, well we all do see things differently. I just recall trying out EOS Standard when I bought my C300 and hating the colors but different strokes. I too prefer WDR for all stuff where I have little to no lighting control and for lit scenes, I use my own tuned version of Abel Cine EOS Match that to me and our clients, looks better than EOS Standard. Poster, huh? Yikes.

I had my own tweaked and by that I mean de -tuned EOS version that was my go to for the Mk1 I owned prior to the Mk2 . The two cameras are really different beasts hence why my original post.
There were some horrible camera profiles out there for the Mk1 and a bunch of them were from Abel. I tried a few of their profiles and the big take away was just because an profile prarameter has an adjustment range of -15, +15 doesn't mean you are required to use the whole range. They made it really easy to create a profile for a specific situtation and the moment you turned the camera 90 degress to some other view/ scene the profile would look like ****. THat's the first clue you've gone off the rails.

I think Poster was created by Steven Poster for the varicam, maybe for a specific project of his. I found in general that C300 camera profiles that tried to mimic Varicam were generally not too successful.

 

[Run&Gun]

I think Poster was created by Steven Poster for the varicam, maybe for a specific project of his. I found in general that C300 camera profiles that tried to mimic Varicam were generally not too successful.

Didn't mean to mislead anyone. I didn't mean he was actually using a scene file/profile called POSTER(didn't even know that really existed). I was just trying to paint the picture of his jacked-up, over-saturated, cartoon poster colors.