C200: Rumor: Internal 4:2:2 recording coming to C200 via FW update

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Fahnon

Well-known member
I’m taking this with a huge grain of salt, but according to CR, there’s a possibility Canon may be announcing 4:2:2 support for the C200 just ahead of NAB. I’d still take it as it’d silence some of the detractors, but upping the bit rate to 400 and going 10-bit would be the more meaningful upgrade when not shooting RAW for me. My little X-T3 is what I’m reaching for when I don’t need RAW, XLR or built in ND these days...

Horses mouth:
https://www.canonrumors.com/feature...eos-r-and-canon-cinema-eos-c200-ahead-of-nab/

As an aside, they mention the Eos R may be following Nikon and getting ProRes RAW support.

NOTE: This was NOT announced or updated on 4/1 and while only a rumor, is not a joke (I'd punch someone in the face).
 
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It says 4:2:2 but doesn’t clarify if it’s 8-bit or 10-bit. If this rumour is true, I suspect it will be 8-bit as that would be a better compromise for Canon for C300 Mark II sales and make owners of the C200 somewhat happy.
 
Alexander.M said:
It says 4:2:2 but doesn’t clarify if it’s 8-bit or 10-bit. If this rumour is true, I suspect it will be 8-bit as that would be a better compromise for Canon for C300 Mark II sales and make owners of the C200 somewhat happy.
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Either this or 10 Bit HD internal only, not UHD
 
422 8-bit isn't very useful for most people over 420 8-bit. 10-bit would provide support for HDR, now supported on Apple/Amazon etc. Living Room devices and YouTube + all 4K TV's are now HDR, so 422 10-bit makes more sense. C300 II still has RGB 444 12-bit (2K)- Canon could give C300 II owners RGB 444 12-bit in 4K and probably even 4K60 10-bit 422 (CFast has the bandwidth and the camera does have a fan and auto-thermal shut off, so no real hardware issues other than potential fan noise and/or limited recording times). Then everybody can be happy (and surprised haha) :)
 
As much as I hope this is true, I'm equally not getting my hopes up....at all. If it took them almost a year to get us .MXF in addition to .mp4 recording at absolutely ZERO increased quality, I'd be shocked if they retroactively added some sort of increased quality internal recording. If anything I could maybe see them uncrippling the output signal to get a better quality recording using an external monitor, but for me that wouldn't be at all interesting
 
It's annoying that Canon cares more about the codecs than the bodies. The C300 III should have a huge advantage just based on the fact that: it has dual slots, more SDI outs, Gen Lock, ect. Getting the C200 to that level should be what the C300 III is about, but make the C200 a camera good enough to kill off all the competition at the lower end and rake in the money. Everyone has Canon glass anyway. I hope they make further improvements to the C3000 III body, it should probably be shaped a bit differently now that the C200 is in that in between DSLR size and cinema space.
 
Quick story... CanonRumors once published a pretty believable FW update rumor for the 5D Mark IV.

It ended up being a big hoax and the site was almost shut down for a day. People absolutely lost it. I did too.

He issued an apology (as a post on his site) and said moving forward he would never rate the rumors so high (rating system) and that because video is not his specialty (photos are), he would defer to others before publishing similar ones.
 
Most rumor sites are wrong most of the time from what I've seen.
While it would be a nice bonus for those of us who own and use the C200 daily, I'm not holding my breathe.
If it happens, pleasant surprise. If it doesn't, we all had a feeling it wouldn't.
 
A lot of them are correct, but it's mostly with products that are coming out and not really anything special like FW updates or deep spec productions (e.g. C300 Mark III will have internal 4K/120p ProRes).

And many of these higher-rated rumors are only confirmed in the final days before announcements.
 
The only reason I have any hope at all in this rumor is an interview I read with a Canon higher-up where they acknowledged how slowly the company moves and, while no concrete promises were made, they said they were trying to change that. Canon, like everyone else, needs to change to stay competitive. It makes sense; the old way of putting a product out and not touching unless something is broken is out of line with what customers expect of most products these days. Hell, your CAR now gets firmware updates.

I would have blamed this mentality on cultural differences, with Canon being a large, old-guard Japanese company, but Sony and Panasonic seem to update their cameras pretty often. Maybe not as far as RED, who fairly recently updated the color science for every camera they've ever made including models over a decade old, but still decent.

I still believe the C200 is a RAW camera first and foremost, but I also know I'm probably in a minority in being ok with that. And Canon could have the definitive mid-range cinema camera if they had a high bit-rate 10-bit codec. I also think they could be close to dropping the C300 Mk III and maybe aren't as worried about cannibalizing the next tier up, which frankly as of right now isn't objectively better than the C200 (no 4k/60 or internal RAW).
 
Fahnon said:
... I would have blamed this mentality on cultural differences, with Canon being a large, old-guard Japanese company, but Sony and Panasonic seem to update their cameras pretty often. Maybe not as far as RED, who fairly recently updated the color science for every camera they've ever made including models over a decade old, but still decent...
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On the FS-7 thread, Doug Jensen is telling others not to raise their hopes too high about the FS-7 replacement/upgrade ... and FS-7 is a 4-year old camera where some form of a replacement would seem natural.

What did I say about a 4-year cycle? Even that was too optimistic.

In any case, it's already the end of the business day on the East Coast.
 
Fahnon said:
...I still believe the C200 is a RAW camera first and foremost, but I also know I'm probably in a minority in being ok with that.
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Right there with you, Cinema RAW Light has been a very good, solid format for us so far, really like what we are getting with it.

I would be MUCH more excited if Canon would just fix the simple things that are awkward and wrong with the existing FW. I'm doing three days of EPK on a TV movie next week. Prod co wants 1080, not 4K and they want 4:2:2 10-bit. Luckily I have a Ninja Blade so I can supply exactly what they want without having to rent a C300 MKII and they are stoked for me to deliver Prores HQ instead of XF-AVC. But the fact that my C200 won't output to HDMI and SDI at the same time is so incredibly frustrating for this shoot, they want a client monitor for interviews and looping HDMI out and running it to a client monitor is super lame compared to just running an SDI while I record to the Blade. Just little things like this could be fixed so easily. The fact that anytime you switch media formats, the camera defaults to 50/60p, annoying as hell or when you were shooting CFast with proxy, when you switch to XF-AVC and then back to CRL, the proxy is turned off by default. Dual Recording also does the same thing, there is NO original state memory built-in, which is just highly bothersome, it means I am fighting with the camera, under durress when running around shooting EPK and BTS on a feature film set.

But they aren't going to fix any of these annoyances, they would have already if they were going to. Fuji blows Canon off the map with fixing, repairing and refining "features" like these. Wish Canon could learn from their little competitors.
 
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