C200: This is why I bought the C200

[puredrifting]

Just an observation. I was hired as third camera on a pretty large shoot over the weekend, shooting performances with an iconic musician for a film. Decent sized production, shot at a club. A camera was an EVA 1, shooting a variety of still lenses with the camera and operator on a dolly. My camera was on tripod, C200 shooting with the Canon EF 24-105 F4 IS II. We shot some performances that went well, but the director and producer who were looking at the images on a 17" production monitor kept coming back, saying that the focus on the A camera was spotty. Shooting still lenses on the dolly camera, the dolly move was an 8' curve, an 8' straight. The shot was tough and pulling focus with a fairly rapid dolly move, especially with short throw still lenses, definitely tough. I was shooting at the other end of the stage from the dolly move and even though I was on sticks, my directive was to roam and "get artsy shots" so I wandered and got all kinds of different stuff of the various musicians. DAF saved the day, all of my shots were in focus and I was even able to tweak the parameters to get some fairly organic rack focus effects using the DAF.

Realistically, the A camera should have had an AC with FIZ with a long throw cine lens and wireless video, but evidently there wasn't enough budget so the operator was trying to track focus in some decidedly challenging moves to ride focus on. The images from the EVA 1 looked really good, it's a great camera but I couldn't help thinking that the dolly ops life would have been so much better if we had swapped cameras, The C200's DAF would have been so good in tracking the musicians as the dolly went by them. This shoot was a perfect example of how handy DAF can be when you don't have an AC and are trying to pull really tough focus throws by hand at a moving target from a moving platform. An AC would have been the right thing to have but when you don't get an AC, DAF can be a lifesaver.

 

[J.Brown]

When it works it's a really good feature.

 

[rob norton]

Just an observation. I was hired as third camera on a pretty large shoot over the weekend, shooting performances with an iconic musician for a film. Decent sized production, shot at a club. A camera was an EVA 1, shooting a variety of still lenses with the camera and operator on a dolly. My camera was on tripod, C200 shooting with the Canon EF 24-105 F4 IS II. We shot some performances that went well, but the director and producer who were looking at the images on a 17" production monitor kept coming back, saying that the focus on the A camera was spotty. Shooting still lenses on the dolly camera, the dolly move was an 8' curve, an 8' straight. The shot was tough and pulling focus with a fairly rapid dolly move, especially with short throw still lenses, definitely tough. I was shooting at the other end of the stage from the dolly move and even though I was on sticks, my directive was to roam and "get artsy shots" so I wandered and got all kinds of different stuff of the various musicians. DAF saved the day, all of my shots were in focus and I was even able to tweak the parameters to get some fairly organic rack focus effects using the DAF.

Realistically, the A camera should have had an AC with FIZ with a long throw cine lens and wireless video, but evidently there wasn't enough budget so the operator was trying to track focus in some decidedly challenging moves to ride focus on. The images from the EVA 1 looked really good, it's a great camera but I couldn't help thinking that the dolly ops life would have been so much better if we had swapped cameras, The C200's DAF would have been so good in tracking the musicians as the dolly went by them. This shoot was a perfect example of how handy DAF can be when you don't have an AC and are trying to pull really tough focus throws by hand at a moving target from a moving platform. An AC would have been the right thing to have but when you don't get an AC, DAF can be a lifesaver.

What type of AF did you use ie face detect or tracking?

 

[indiawilds]

In the world I live in at the moment Canon's Dual Pixel AF is lifesaver. The situation you are describing is ideal for the C200 as A camera. Were you shooting in Raw?

 

[J.Brown]

If AF on the C200 could detect faces properly it would be great but that's not the case. I had a shoot today going back and forth between two people and sometimes it found a face and sometimes it didn't. Faces have to be facing the camera straight and even then it often fails. But to track a focus point when people are walking towards the camera usually works fine.

 

[puredrifting]

I was using focus tracking as my angle to the most of the faces was oblique. Was shooting XF-AVC, but I don't see how that factors into anything with DAF? I agree with what J.Brown says, face recognition doesn't work consistently. Most of the time it works but often it will drop out for no reason, it feels as if this is V1.0 of this technology and it needs one more generation of tweaking and refinement to be able to be relied upon. Same with the same technology on the XT-3. It's good, but not consistent and not being able to choose the face it's tracking when there are multiple faces in the scene is frustrating. At least the C200 lets you choose which one to track.