C300: Matching C500 and C300 mk ii

N

Newsguy

Well-known member
Hey all. I'm actually a Sony user professionally so I spend most of my time on that side of the forum. In this case, we rented 5 cameras, two C500s and three C300 mkii. This was what the rental house could offer for this many cams. We'll be shooting a round table style panel. Normally this would be done with large studio cameras, but in this case they opted for a cinematic feel. Unfortunately, because of the short turnaround, they will do a line cut of the cameras as if it were being shot live. Because of this, I'm in charge of getting the cameras color matched as close as possible so that post is more about adding b-roll etc. and not worrying about color correcting.

Today we received the cameras. The first thing I did was set all of them to 0db gain just because I believe they don't share native ISO and I'd rather know that they're all at the base ISO before anything else. The engineers set all of the cams to the 709 preset because well, that's what tv engineers do.

My question is, what's the best way to go from here to get these cams closer to color matched? We noticed that the C500s shoot a little warmer with all settings being equal. The C300s were cooler, and when trying to correct this by warming the white balance a bit, skin tones turned a bit magenta on the C300s. Are the any gotchas or tricks from the Canon guys? I have shot plenty on the C500 before, but this is my first time with the 300mkii. Thanks!
 
Hey, I've shot with the C500 with my C300II and I've noticed the colour is totally different on them. I ended up trying to match in post, but as you're cutting live I'd say the best thing is probably to:

Select 'Cinema EOS Original' as the colour matrix in the C300II cams. For gamma, perhaps one of the standard gammas or wide dr and Rec709 for gammut.

Obviously this isn't getting the best image out of the C300IIs, but it'll be a much better match for live switching
 
Your engineer should be able to hook a C300 MKII and a C500 output to live switcher with scopes and paint the images to match, using the CP settings and some color charts, there are offsets for all of the color spectrum. Isn't this what video engineers are paid to do, paint cameras to match? Would be easier if you rented the RC-V100s for each camera but technically could be accomplished without them as well. The good news is, once he paints a C300 MKII and C500, the settings can easily be transferred to the other cameras.
 
Newsguy said:
Hey all. I'm actually a Sony user professionally so I spend most of my time on that side of the forum. In this case, we rented 5 cameras, two C500s and three C300 mkii. This was what the rental house could offer for this many cams. We'll be shooting a round table style panel. Normally this would be done with large studio cameras, but in this case they opted for a cinematic feel. Unfortunately, because of the short turnaround, they will do a line cut of the cameras as if it were being shot live. Because of this, I'm in charge of getting the cameras color matched as close as possible so that post is more about adding b-roll etc. and not worrying about color correcting.

Today we received the cameras. The first thing I did was set all of them to 0db gain just because I believe they don't share native ISO and I'd rather know that they're all at the base ISO before anything else. The engineers set all of the cams to the 709 preset because well, that's what tv engineers do.

My question is, what's the best way to go from here to get these cams closer to color matched? We noticed that the C500s shoot a little warmer with all settings being equal. The C300s were cooler, and when trying to correct this by warming the white balance a bit, skin tones turned a bit magenta on the C300s. Are the any gotchas or tricks from the Canon guys? I have shot plenty on the C500 before, but this is my first time with the 300mkii. Thanks!
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What you've found is exactly what I've found. First off, the cameras use a different calculation for the Kelvin scale so you can't match white balance by setting them to the same value. You either need to do a custom white balance for the space for both cameras or create a chart that matches the cameras. The cameras can be matched fairly close by changing the color values in the camera, but it takes time and it will never be perfect. The primary problem is the red to green bias in the skin tones so the R-G needs to be shifted quite a bit. Also, the C300 II doesn't have as much gain on the blue channel in general for most of the color profiles. I would start with Cinema EOS Original as somebody else said, although neutral is also close.
 
Thank you all for the tips and suggestions. I was able to try them out, but we weren't able to match everything with the time we had allotted. There may be the opportunity to match them better in post and discard the live cut, which would be a much better option.
 
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