On fence, confused by footage...

SuperEgo Saxton

SuperEgo Saxton

Active member
Now I really like everything they're going for and trying to do with the c300.

From the footage I have seen the quality is amazing!

However, a lot of footage I've seen (mainly the short demos to showcase the camera) look sooo television-y...if that makes sense?

Almost as if it was shot at 30p/60p or something. It didn't have the filmic flow.

On the other hand I have seen footage that is completely filmic, mobius being one. So I'm just confused? Why does a lot of footage look video-y?

I apologise for my lack of technical terms here. I'd just wanna know, what gives?
 
That could be from a lot of different things. For one, picture styles. If you don't shoot Canon Log, it will look like any other TV camera, horrible. Second, lighting. Lighting is extremely important in giving the image a certain look, most of those demos you saw are shot by extremely unfortunate and untalented people, without any regard whosoever to anything in front of the camera, they just picked it up and pressed the rec button... if only making good-looking cinematic images were that easy and fast... What I don't know is, why Canon even lets this footage go round supposedly promoting this camera.

I've shot with the camera and its really an amazing camera, worth every penny for sure (at least until other cameras come that can shoot as good for cheaper). As of the moment, even with its specs not being amazing, it produces better images than anything else out there, excluding only the Alexa.

But you should go out, rent one and try it for yourself. Its stupid money to buy it without 'test driving' it first.

Just saying'...
 
Just had my first weekend with the C300. Absolutely in love with the camera. I know what you're saying about the televisionish look. Like Nuno said, lighting is critical but it's also in the picture profile. I'm definitely going to turn down the sharpness so the edges don't look so edgy.

And then there's contrast. There are many exceptions of course but IMO, the film look often means low contrast while the video/amateur look often means high contrast images. The C300 is an absolute star at low contrast images. It's one of the things I love most about the camera. It leaves you free to dial in the desired contrast in post.
 
I think I am going to have to rent it. Reading up on it, the specs are decent imo.

A lot of people disregarded the camera for one simple fact: 1080p output. But it isn't as simple as that. I understand it has a 4k sensor? The colours are brilliant.

Vincent laforet really showed the camera. But I agree with you the others were poor!

Even on this forum there is a another short called 'mykim' I think it was?

That looked gorgeous and had a filmic quality to it.
 
Much simpler for me so far. I'm using log and transfer in FCP7. In the L&T preferences, you can choose to bring it in as any flavor of ProRes or in it's native codec. I'm working on a 3-year old MacBook Pro and with ProRes 422 it came in at about 0.8x realtime. With the native codec, it comes in at about 5x realtime. Obviously this will be based on your computer specs. The native codec plays back instantly on the timeline with no rendering required. Haven't played with the footage too much at this point so that's all I can say for now.
 
The native bitrate is only slightly higher than the native bitrate of Canon SLRs. If transcoding, you'll want to go with ProRes 422 over LT. At 23.976 fps that's 117Mbps vs 82 Mbps. No extra hardware needed as far as I'm concerned.
 
Graham King said:
The native bitrate is only slightly higher than the native bitrate of Canon SLRs. If transcoding, you'll want to go with ProRes 422 over LT. At 23.976 fps that's 117Mbps vs 82 Mbps. No extra hardware needed as far as I'm concerned.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info Graham, the c300 does sound like the next best option. I'll take the advice and give it a rent first :)
 
SuperEgo Saxton said:
Even on this forum there is a another short called 'mykim' I think it was?

That looked gorgeous and had a filmic quality to it.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I produced that one, which was shot by Mick Jones. I produced and helped shoot another short - "The Cost", which looks a bit more flat. The issue really was the color grade and lighting. Both were shot in Canon Log. The former used only the sun with only one lit shot. It was also graded very flat on the first pass. Most people think it looks great, but one person said it looked like a video camera... mostly because it was too low contrast, and it was so very sharp. I'm going to re-grade it to bump up the contrast.

Note the cam is very sharp, but in C-Log it defaults to -12 sharpness. Other profiles are a LOT higher, which is frankly just too sharp.

Mykim was shot using lights and bounce in many spots. It was also graded against scopes so that the blacks barely "kissed" 0 IRE. The wide contrast range along with the lighting decisions made for a better looking shoot.

Ultimately, lighting is so very key. And it doesn't have to mean lights that you plug in, but just how the light in a scene is chosen whether that's from the sun, practicals, or proper lights.
 
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