C500: Mark II: New project shot during lockdown

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Barry G

Well-known member

Just finished up a new short film series completed during lockdown. Will be premiering it next Wednesday, and I'll have more about it later, but here's the teaser (view in 4k on Chrome).
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Pandemic Pictures is a wholly owned subsidiary of Barry Goyette Stills Motion & Design which in itself is a non-entity
 
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puredrifting said:
Great stuff Barry! I love your dance stuff, you have a great eye for photographing women and dance.
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Thanks man. The c500ii’s iteration of DPAF, and 6k/60 make this a great camera for keeping up with dancers. As this piece was improvised in a small space, with very few set shots, the camera’s nimbleness was a big help.
 
Looks great Barry. Was that AF for that shot at 00:13? How are you finding the DPAF with strong back lighting like that?
 
rob norton said:
Looks great Barry. Was that AF for that shot at 00:13? How are you finding the DPAF with strong back lighting like that?
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Yes.. although I think she might have been a little closer than MFD — the camera was tracking her but then the box went red— we reshot it a couple of times but I’m not sure which take I used (I think i actually liked that it was a tad out, given all the flare) in the first film, you’ll see an extended series of shots of one of the dancers in that backlit angle moving around at full speed.. and the camera never really struggled with it.. I’ve shot a lot “into the light” and this camera always handles it surprisingly well.
 
Barry G said:
Thanks man. The c500ii’s iteration of DPAF, and 6k/60 make this a great camera for keeping up with dancers. As this piece was improvised in a small space, with very few set shots, the camera’s nimbleness was a big help.
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No kidding! I shot my girlfriend doing a dance tryout (spinning, jumping, the full nine) and the face AF held on no problem for the full 4 hours we recorded. Really impressed!
 
Good stuff Barry. I'm guessing you're using TARGET mode on the AF? Those damn masks might save Grandma's life but they can screw with face-detection!
 
Liam Hall said:
Good stuff Barry. I'm guessing you're using TARGET mode on the AF? Those damn masks might save Grandma's life but they can screw with face-detection!
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Yes. I honestly don’t find face detection works well enough in these hyper dance sequences.. depends so much on the “face”. (Canon’s face detect algorithm still doesn’t like certain people — thin tan men, redheads). It’s great in interviews, but even then I had a two-shot sit-down a little while ago.. and registered both faces, and it kept dropping one of them and switching to the other. On this piece I kept it in face priority but with the big target in the center...it really worked well... most of the time though I think the target was doing the heavy lifting.

I wish that in “face only”, it would allow you to identify a face, or otherwise allow you to touch screen what you want in focus.. when it loses a face in that mode, it can be a ***** to get it back.. tapping the screen in that mode is futile.
 
NorBro said:
You can't tap a face to initiate the box to start tracking it?
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With Canon, if the tracking loses the face, you can't do anything to force it to see the face until the box comes back on it's own.
Or at least thats how my C300 MKII and C200 work, not sure about the 500 MKII as I know it has a newer version of DPAF?
 
Not having that in the C500/300 Mark II/III would be absolutely insane.

I somehow missed that for the C200 and C300 Mark II as I never used either with their touch screens (and more understanding it's not available for the latter), but that functionality has been around for 5+ years in their photography cameras.
 
NorBro said:
Not having that in the C500/300 Mark II/III would be absolutely insane.

I somehow missed that for the C200 and C300 Mark II as I never used either with their touch screens (and more understanding it's not available for the latter), but that functionality has been around for 5+ years in their photography cameras.
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To clarify, if you are set to face detection priority and the camera loses face detection tracking, it reverts to standard AF. If you are set to face detection only and it loses the face, it locks the focus.
It is frustrating that you cannot "help" the face detection if it loses the face.

Here's their langauge...which is a bit confusing but once you use it, you see how it works. I have not pulled the C500 MKII manual to see if they actually changed how this all works or if they added more settings.

Face Detection.jpg
 
That's generally how AF works on all cameras because those are the only two choices; either revert to a box/area in the middle (or a flexible point/spot if you're lucky), or stop working - but the major difference is you can just tap the screen on the 1DX Mark II, 5D Mark IV, EOS R, etc. to get it going again.
 
BTW, I started thinking you've probably never used those since you usually use more professional cameras (with your X-T3), but you can see what I am talking about in the first 20 seconds below.

Touchscreen DPAF is literally Canon's greatest creation since their inception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjSSeG-Zftg
 
puredrifting said:
To clarify, if you are set to face detection priority and the camera loses face detection tracking, it reverts to standard AF. If you are set to face detection only and it loses the face, it locks the focus.
It is frustrating that you cannot "help" the face detection if it loses the face.

Here's their langauge...which is a bit confusing but once you use it, you see how it works. I have not pulled the C500 MKII manual to see if they actually changed how this all works or if they added more settings.

View attachment 139488
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As the C500II was my first touch screen, I was really surprised when I couldn't use touch in the "face only" mode. It's a bit counterintuitive I think...yes, that mode shouldn't "jump off" a face (but it does if there are two faces and it loses the one you're currently focused on) but that shouldn't mean that you can't manually input a focus point. It seems like that mode would be infinitely more useful if you could touch your way out of a face detect failure. On my interview two-shot, I sat there trying not to sweat...banging away on the screen before I realized I just needed to switch to target mode with a small box and then life was good. While mostly I find Face detect valuable in interview situations, I've had a couple of occurences with the same winemaker, in closeup, in good light and bad light where it just wouldn't see him as a face. Luckily in that situation, target mode is really just as good. I hope though that they can improve the algorithm over time in FW (not like canon to do that, but they are so close and it's likely these two new cameras are going to be around for a few years).
 
Barry G said:
As the C500II was my first touch screen, I was really surprised when I couldn't use touch in the "face only" mode. It's a bit counterintuitive I think...yes, that mode shouldn't "jump off" a face (but it does if there are two faces and it loses the one you're currently focused on) but that shouldn't mean that you can't manually input a focus point. It seems like that mode would be infinitely more useful if you could touch your way out of a face detect failure. On my interview two-shot, I sat there trying not to sweat...banging away on the screen before I realized I just needed to switch to target mode with a small box and then life was good. While mostly I find Face detect valuable in interview situations, I've had a couple of occurences with the same winemaker, in closeup, in good light and bad light where it just wouldn't see him as a face. Luckily in that situation, target mode is really just as good. I hope though that they can improve the algorithm over time in FW (not like canon to do that, but they are so close and it's likely these two new cameras are going to be around for a few years).
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If they could make it work as well as the Sony FX9 AF works, we'd all be Gold.

I did a shoot a few weeks ago with the three X-T3s, well lit, simple BG, a presenter reading prompter and used the X-T3 face/eye tracking with the latest FW update and it was rock solid, I was very happy.
The X-T3 AF is actually more sophisticated than the C200/300 MKII now as it lets you even choose track right eye or left eye. I used eye tracking on the B camera that was on my XF16mm f/1.4 WR mounted on my Rhino EVO Motion, sliding back and forth and it too
worked flawlessly. I was monitoring all three cameras using the ATEM Mini Pro on a single screen and I kept an eagle eye on both camera's focus the entire shoot as I know AF on all cameras works most of the time but sometimes does weird things.
The third angle was set to manual focus with the Fringer Pro and the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM but that camera was just shooting the product, which wasn't moving. But generally, overall, I have found the Canon AF to be superior to the Fuji but now that I have the
latest firmware on the Fujis, I should do an AF shootout to see which is better for several situations.
 
GREEN/RED/BLUE: 3 Short Films by Barry Goyette. The goals for this project were modest. I invited 3 dancers to come to my studio during lockdown, and perform for my camera. There were no rehearsals. No camera blocking, and almost no direction from me (that's a first). The dancers arrived at my studio to a space significantly smaller than what they are used to performing in. My hope was to capture something essential about these three artists, in a way that was intimate and unforced. We're used to seeing dancers from a distance, on TV or on a stage. My camera was at times, quite literally sharing the space with them, trying to reveal the energy that a dancer feels and projects through their movement. The result is raw and more than a little rough around the edges. Dancers take up a lot of room, and given the lockdown nature of the piece, I decided to just let the "studio" show.

Shot in 5.9k 60p. 24p project with various rate conforms. CRL. Most shots are handheld. Wider shots on a slider.

Set design by Home Depot.
Lighting is a single Aputure 300d MKII with a spotlight mount pointed at the floor or directly at the dancer. Plus a little color in the back from two Arri L7C.

This link goes live at 7pm PST (it's a 4k finish that I uprezzed to 5k for youtube - which I think holds the grain better).

 
I couldn't choose higher-quality than 720p for the stream - with lots of pixelation (and FYI the file on YouTube seems to be 30p) - but now that it's over I see the higher-resolution options are available and will check it out again.

I like how the RED dancer ended her sequence.
 
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