Canon C100 praise & annoyances

[tjc320]

The Ninja records ProRes, not RAW.

Yea, I have this bad habit of calling and labeling untouched footage as raw. I should have clarified.

 

[primrose]

Way, way, way overpriced for what you are getting. I have Canon dslr's, and was considering the C100 until Blackmagic reduced the price of their Cinema Camera to $1,995.

I will consider purchasing Canon again in the future if they come back to reality with their pricing structure. Way too expensive for what they give you.

 

[syder]

Way, way, way overpriced for what you are getting. I have Canon dslr's, and was considering the C100 until Blackmagic reduced the price of their Cinema Camera to $1,995.

I will consider purchasing Canon again in the future if they come back to reality with their pricing structure. Way too expensive for what they give you.

It aint overpriced if you're a pro and you make a living using cameras for anything other than fiction/something where you have total control over the light. For the extra investment over a BMC you get a camera which actually handles nicely, has ND filters, professional audio inputs, is fantastic in low light (whereas the BMC is significantly worse than DSLRs at high iso)...

The $3k difference in cost is about a weeks worth of work for many people. And for events/documentary/weddings the investment will be well worth it, as the BMC's limitations will really show up there.

That said, the BMC is now so cheap, that it's a no-brainer for a lot of people. If it gets you one job you'll make most the money back on it. That said, the weird controls, stupid crop, rubbish ergonomics and poor low-light performance will still deter a lot of people.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

Yah, but to create your new "consumer" refrigerator they don't take a $50,000 model and cripple it. I think the fact that the 5D3 video was such obvious nerf-ware is what really stuck in people's craw.

I understand the desire for product differentiation, but I think Canon misjudged the market reaction. Not to mention they increased the price of the 5D3 and only made modest improvements over a 4 year old camera. Think about how far computers have come during that time: My $2000 laptop will smoke a power PC from 4 years ago.

I'm not bitter, I swear. 8)

I don't know that it was crippled, it may not have been as good as people wanted, but whether or not that was deliberate or not is debatable. It is a stills camera after all that happens to shoot pretty good video. The stills side had huge improvements and the video had improvements too (although not as many). Why add a ton of video improvements when the majority of users are buying it for it's still capabilities? The 5D2 was an accident, it only seems logical to try to create separate products for each user base (still/video).

Even if the 5D3 had whatever you felt was lacking I doubt it would have stopped anyone from buying a C300. If it were $5000 I could understand, but there is a pretty massive price difference between the two. It just seems that if Canon did cripple the 5D3 it wasn't because they were worried about the C300.

And with people getting it for $2500-$3000 regularly I don't think the 5D3 is considered "overpriced" anymore.

If the 5D3 wasn't crippled then how to explain ML RAW detail vs. uncompressed over HDMI to Ninja 2 detail vs. in cam compressed? Barely any difference between the last two but HUGE compared to the first.

Either marketing had them nerf it or the digic chip simply stinks at producing decent IQ and when all you have is 1080p to work with it doesn't deliver and in that case why was there ZERO improvement in Digic in that regard since the 5D2??

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

Some of the complaints about the 5Dm3 being crippled were just rubbish... The only thing that irked me was the choice of codec - 90mb/s all-I seemed deliberately just under the 100 mb/s datarate that is what places like the BBC demand for broadcast work (or 50mb/s for log GoP - and Canon have a good 50 mb/s long GoP codec they could have used).

nope completely true

With the addition of HDMI out in April that should change though - and I think largely that's come about as a result of the criticisms that have been levelled at Canon (and the fact that the Nikons clean HDMI out allows for that).

oops hah thought this was a new thread, whoa from 2012!! Anyway I think you were proved WAY wrong by the 2013 release of ML. It shows they totally did nerf the 5D3 video. I mean they made the chip be able to do amazing video. But then after that they trashed the signal. It's totally proven. Although whether purely due to marketing fools or whether due to marketing not having the foresight to ask engineering to improve how digic handles video is hard to say for sure.

...And the video improvements over the 5Dm2 are actually a hell of a lot bigger than people like to give credit. By the far the biggest being no more moire - which was thing that would occasionally make DSLR footage a real headache, even if you spotted the issue, having to do things like ask an interview subject to change their jacket/shirt because it didn't agree with the camera is hardly the way to put someone at ease and get a good performance from them. The high ISO performance is also a big step up. The audio capabilities (whilst still somewhat crap) are distinctly better. The codec is a definite improvement (although not quite what people wanted). And we have clean HDMI out to look forwards to next year for 220 mb/s 4:2:2 DNxHD goodness.

Yeah the fact it bins on chip so it doesn't have to line skip was huge, it got rid of the moire and improved SNR nearly 2 stops.

But then they go and nerf the signal somewhere late in the pipeline (although the clean HDMI out proved it was not the compressor, since that ended up barely helping at all).

 

[sanj]

Fimmakers shoot with film cameras, videographers shoot with video cameras.

Totally untrue.

 

[Etienne]

Fimmakers shoot with film cameras, videographers shoot with video cameras. The C100 is a video camera, not a film camera.

Sure ... and real writers use a quill.

 

[flowers]

Fimmakers shoot with film cameras, videographers shoot with video cameras. The C100 is a video camera, not a film camera.

Real film makers spend $100 thousand on film school to learn how to order around 300 people drawing cables and shooting on 15 cameras at the same time, never touching a camera themselves. The cameras must be branded Arriflex and must use 35mm film stock. The 75mm film stock is reserved for the really good film makers. They also learn to order around 100 more people to go through the 300 hours of footage and cut it, grade it and add special effects to get 1.5 hours of usable footage. They also learn you can only make movies in Hollywood sets or on location if you have to pay $1000 / day to use the location. Without these qualifications it's impossible to make a movie!