C500: I went ahead and did a C500 Fan Noise Quick Video Test - See Vimeo link & talk?

B.Berry said:
I just bought the C500, and out of the box it roared, those cooling fans are loud. Doing interviews on location or the studio and having these fans on would be a pain in the ass! A producer, or director, would turn to the cameraman rolling the C500 and say "is that fan going to stay on during the interview" dealing with some celebrity interviews, or sensitive medical, or high end corporate boss interview, you just can't have a fan noise going off like the fans cooling the C500 in 2K or 4K. Here in LA, I have never worked with a louder camera noise than that of the C500. I get my modified external fan unit tomorrow, and if it works and keeps those bloody internal fans from going off, I will keep the C500.
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I wonder if recorders have any effect on how hard the camera works. All of you here (besides one person, I think) use the 7Q and I'm assuming Shane did too (or something else, but not an Atomos).

I've recorded so many interviews with people talking in the room (an event), and the audio was always usable because the interviewee's voice was so dominant with a lav recording. These fans are like room ambience to me, but yours seem like they are really loud.
 
Paul Walker said:
Hi Oliver

Yes, I own a C500 with Shogun Flame so 4:2:2 10 bit at 4k ProRes and also a C100 (which I love). Re-creating the fan solution is very simple and I notice there are better 35mm brushless fans out there, specifically the Noctuas which are virtually silent. The tricky part is trying to remake the C500 'hugger' solution. This will cost me money as I can't DIY it but I'll pay someone to get it done. Will do all of this when out of bed with flu...

Pourquoi?

Paul
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Thanks Paul, How come you went with the Shogun Flame? Does the normal shogun do the 4k pro res up to 30p? Also how is it with the 2k I want to shoot mainly 2k.

Do you find it quite noisy too? [The Fan] I can't imagine it being too bad

Thanks
 
I am keen to find this out, I can't see it being too much of a problem. But I haven't shot with the C500.

Norbro. are you shooting with the Atomos. I was looking at the 1st gen shogun, I am sure this would work with the C500. I want to mainly shoot the 2k.
 
Thanks, Yeah I started the original thread, Still yet to read through all the comments lol.

Shame about the 2k, No way of working at all? I would rather have the 12 bit 4:4:4 over 4k due to grading etc. How much drives are you using per shoot on average?
 
I have a few Extreme Pros, but I'm not planning on owning the C500. If I did, I would probably use 1-2 480GB SSDs per day.

I always drop the quality when filming interviews because most of it always gets covered by b-roll anyway.

So if I owned the camera, I would shoot all my b-roll in 422HQ (very short takes for the most part) and the interviews in 422LT. (No one notices a difference.)

For most of my productions, one 480GB SSD would be enough.
 
C-Mac said:
I am going to let your opinion and my opinion on the ME66 stand as it is... simply one opinion vs another.
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So you're saying that "POS" ME66 mic is as good as a Schoeps and is also a perfectly suitable mic for booming indoors on wood floors?



I'm with Ned on his "opinion." I use a Schoeps CMC641 for interior interviews. I'll use lavs only if I'm packing light and don't have room for a boom pole, extra light stand, and boom pole holder. Sometimes I'll set up a lav as a backup to the Schoeps, but generally I find the Schoeps reliable enough I'll go with just that. Before I had the Schoeps, I used lavs as primary, because standard shotgun mics (such as my Audio Technica AT875r at the time) don't sound as good indoors due to reflections that most shotgun mics are prone to indoors. Now a days I'll use my Sanken CS-3e if I'm outdoors or need more isolation indoors (such as filming tradeshows).

The Sanken CS-3e is perhaps the best shotgun mic at not getting reflections indoors, which is why I choose it, but it's still not as good at avoiding reflections as the Schoeps CMC641 is; the CMC641 is not a shotgun mic, it's a small diaphram condensor mic.

ME66 is a cheap shotgun microphone that I don't think you'll find any sound professionals using as their A-mic, particularly indoors.

A good article from B&H on the mattter, "Interior Dialog Boompole Microphone Roundup": https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/audio/buying-guide/interior-dialog-boompole-microphone-roundup
 
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Your boom advice is good overall but free tip from a sound guy, ALWAYS use both a lav (wired) and a shotgun/cardioid whenever possible, editors love choice and occasionally they may even use a blend of the two in problem situations. Recording with only a boom is eliminating options, no reason to ever do that unless you are prevented from laving talent, which can happen occasionally. If exterior ambient noise kills you on the boom, you can often save the day by using the lav. Clothing rubbing on the lav, you have the boom as backup. Oh, and if you use a wireless lav for a sit down interview, I will personally smack your knuckles with a very heavy wood and steel ruler, only the lazy use wireless lavs for anything when they could run an XLR. The best wireless mic system in the world still sounds worse than a $25.00 XLR cable.

Eric Coughlin said:
So you're saying that "POS" ME66 mic is as good as a Schoeps and is also a perfectly suitable mic for booming indoors on wood floors?



I'm totally with Ned on his "opinion." I use a Schoeps CMC641 for interior interviews. I'll use lavs only if I'm packing light and don't have room for a boom pole, extra light stand, and boom pole holder. Sometimes I'll set up a lav as a backup to the Schoeps, but generally I find the Schoeps reliable enough I'll go with just that. Before I had the Schoeps, I used lavs as primary, because standard shotgun mics (such as my Audio Technica AT875r at the time) don't sound as good indoors due to reflections that most shotgun mics are prone to indoors. Now a days I'll use my Sanken CS-3e if I'm outdoors or need more isolation indoors (such as filming tradeshows).

The Sanken CS-3e is perhaps the best shotgun mic at not getting reflections indoors, which is why I choose it, but it's still not as good sounding indoors as Schoeps CMC641.

ME66 is a cheap shotgun microphone that I don't think you'll find any sound professionals using as their A-mic, particularly indoors.

A good article from B&H on the mattter, "Interior Dialog Boompole Microphone Roundup": https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/audio/buying-guide/interior-dialog-boompole-microphone-roundup
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Yeah, I didn't even own a wireless mic until just a few months ago. Always do hard wired for sit down interviews. Well, except on a recent travel shoot where my hard wired Sanken COS-11D mic clip was missing, so I resorted to the wireless I brought as a backup (with a Countryman B6 lav which had a mic clip) instead of using a not good looking way to attach the Sanken to the people's clothes.

When lav is A-audio, I don't want to hide it under clothes as I get rusting too often. I suppose avoiding clothing rusting is a skill I still need to master, as whenever I hire a professional audio guy they seem to avoid it quite well.

For me the thing with using a lav as a backup to the Schoeps, is since I typically have a wider shot, I'd then need to hide the lav. As I said, if lav is A-audio, then I'm willing to sacrifice the look of the video by having a visible lav in order to be sure I'm getting good audio with no clothing rustling. But if lav is just a backup, then I'm willing to risk having rusting, so I hide the lav so the video will look better; I don't want to lower the video quality just so my backup sounds better. But then I often find I get rusting. At which point I start to question why I'm wasting time on set to spend a few minutes taping down and hiding a mic on each new interviewee when the audio quality is often so compromised by the rustling. At which point, depending on scheduling, the client, who the editor is, etc., I'll either decide to use a lav as backup or not.

As I edit my company (non freelance) projects, it is sometimes nice to listen to the audio (either in VLC, Windows Media Player, or the editing timeline), and be able to hear exactly what it sounds like, before you've taken the added step to separate channels in the case where you recorded boom on one channel and lav on another channel.

When someone else is editing, and you record boom on left and lav on right, you run the risk of the idiot editor (always best to assume the editor is an idiot (hence another reason to shoot in Wide DR instead of log, because you assume the editor doesn't know how to color correct)) not knowing to isolate the audio tracks. You may leave some kind of note for them somewhere, but that's assuming they're smart enough to pay attention to your note, and do as you ask, just like when you tell a producer, "This log footage will need to be color graded," only to later see the flat footage is what they used in the final product. Also, if the editor is an idiot, but smart enough to separate the tracks, how will they know which is the better audio (the amazing Schoeps or the "POS" lav?)? The editor is probably deaf as it is. At least, best to assume such.

The type of shoot also affects whether I'd use a lav as backup or not. Say I'm filming 5-10 hours of interviews for a 3.5 minute promo film, as the last promo video I did through my company. One thing that happens on rare occasions is the interviewee may briefly lean forward (perhaps in excitement, as a gesture, etc.) during the interview, going in front of the boom mic's placement, so they're then off-axis and don't sound as good, while a lav would have still caught them well. Well, thing is, I've got 10 other hours of interviews to choose from, so if my audio goes out for three seconds, most likely I didn't need that sound bite (to the extent that laving all the interviewees for the entire project would be worthwhile over loosing three seconds of audio out of 10 hours of interviewing). And let's say worst case scenario the audio from their entire interview goes bad, I wasn't planning to use everyone I interviewed in the final edit anyway, so there's a good chance I don't even have to have their interview if worst comes to worst, and I can still give the client a high quality video that everyone is happy with.

Now if I'm filming some 60 Minutes network style interviews where they're using the whole interview, then I'd most likely use a lav as backup (and perhaps not hidden as well).
 
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NorBro said:
I have a few Extreme Pros, but I'm not planning on owning the C500. If I did, I would probably use 1-2 480GB SSDs per day.

I always drop the quality when filming interviews because most of it always gets covered by b-roll anyway.

So if I owned the camera, I would shoot all my b-roll in 422HQ (very short takes for the most part) and the interviews in 422LT. (No one notices a difference.)

For most of my productions, one 480GB SSD would be enough.
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Sounds great, ahh the 2k, seems such a pain. I am surprised Atomos have not addressed this at all? Very strange.

Were you happy with the C500 overall?
 
Eric Coughlin said:
So you're saying that "POS" ME66 mic is as good as a Schoeps and is also a perfectly suitable mic for booming indoors on wood floors?
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LOL, I never said that the ME66 is as good as a Schoeps. That is silly talk!!! I just found the reaction to the ME66 to be a bit extreme in it's approach. I prefer a boom over a lav for the kinds of work I do. When I don't have a sound person, I like to split the boom and record one channel at a normal level and one channel at a slightly reduced level as a safety. In my humble opinion the ME66 is fine for most of my situations. I have a professional audio post house working on pretty much so all of our projects and they always mention how clean our audio sounds. All the interview work on our site is ME66 with C100 or 1Dc with Tascam DR100MKII. I would love to have a Shoeps and will pick up a Schoeps at some point. With that said, I don't do any events, conferences, or man on the street work... it's all story telling interviews, some tv commercials, and creative projects.

Best Regards,

Chris
 
ollywood88 said:
Sounds great, ahh the 2k, seems such a pain. I am surprised Atomos have not addressed this at all? Very strange.

Were you happy with the C500 overall?
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The C500 is pretty much done (I'm sorry to say, but I think we knew that already), and I assume only a handful of people in the world still use it. Atomos carried over its engineering from the original Shogun to the new recorders to support it and make existing C500 owners happy (and potentially new owners), but they probably won't bother providing anymore support for it. Sony cameras will get all of the attention for now.

I like the camera a lot...I was familiar with it as it's like a C300. Love the image. But sensors are rapidly getting so insanely good for less and less money...and the C500 is just too old (only the Alexa can get away with its age, ha) and too expensive for me for at its current price. I would, however, consider a used one (maybe even a new one) if it shot 4K/60p ProRes to the Inferno and nothing else interested me.
 
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The canon C500 records internal to CF cards, MXF in files in 8 bit 422, just like the C300. It's when the camera is set to 2-4K the outputs activate the internal cooling fans. You don't have to be hooked up to an external recorder for the fans to trigger, when in the 2-4k mode the system is constantly delivering the massive data stream through the two 3G SDI output ports, so when the camera reaches the 77* inside, the fans kick in (in the automatic setting) the fan stays on in the on mode. The amount of data pumping through those 3G SDI ports is huge, for 2K 30fps 2,388,787,200 bits per second, and in 4K RAW 30fps 2,654,208,000 bits per second. I'm of to AbleCine LA, to get the external fan, I will follow up on my findings. The C500 is a very special camera, with this fan noise eliminated it will be good for quite a few more years of service :)
 
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NorBro said:
The C500 is pretty much done (I'm sorry to say, but I think we knew that already), and I assume only a handful of people in the world still use it . . .
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The C500 will not be "done" until C-Mac puts it next to his blazing fireplace as he tests the internal fans at 120 degrees . . . then it will be crispy!
 
Here's a quick video testing the C500 fan modification and fan noise with a unidirectional lav and the same shot gun mic used in the last video. The uni lav did a better job with the C500 noise, but the fan modification basically removed any issue with fan noise. The test is what it is... not fancy... but I am happy to keep the camera after the modification. I know the video is out of focus, but it can be difficult to focus oneself on the 200mm side of a 2.8 lens. My bad.

https://vimeo.com/189050004

Best Regards,

Chris McGuinness
 
Awesome test again, Chris. The lav does reduce the internal fan noise to a more acceptable level, but is no match for your ME-66's sound quality. I can't hear the external fans at all, even though you said they were rated at 35 dB. Perhaps running them at 9V as opposed to 12V makes them much quieter (as the RPM is lower).

Great work and thanks very much!

See Norbro, C-Mac is now one more to add to your "handful of C500 users in the world." I mean, in the whole wide world, there are only 5 people plus Chris! That's an exclusive club.
 
haha. I really do like the camera though! I'm sure all of you guys will produce amazing content with it.
 
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