jcs

As expected, CLog doesn't provide any more usable DR on the 1DC vs. the 1DX II without CLog.

Relativity Theory- it depends on one's point of view, right? If one is running a business, they need a certain number of customers/viewers/subscribers etc. to make a living. They don't need the longest queue/line, but they need enough to keep the lights on. Many times film critics reviews are far off from the average viewer. Sometimes critics may be influenced by elements totally unrelated to the film itself (politics, money, personal life experience, etc.). When statistics are used without bias (understandably hard to do, thus the desire for double-blind studies), the 'law of large numbers' when sampling a population gives a pretty good unbiased view of collective reality. That said, we learned a major lesson while working at MySpace (and social media in general): popular things become more popular because they are popular. Thus with enough advertising money, things can become popular primarily from promotion. The more indirect, such as social media posts, the better. That said, people are becoming more savvy to sniff out this kind of fake social media. It would appear most of the popular YouTubers generated audiences by creating great content for their respective markets (advertising can only go so far).

Such as 79,400 views for that camera test. Northrup and Dugdale have millions of views by making camera tests entertaining. Whether you agree with them or not, they are creating content that many people enjoy watching. My 'best' camera test only got 26K views- no story and pretty boring (this kindof had a story, though not much really going on (11.5K views)). How about yours?

I lived for 3 weeks in Royal Leamington Spa* and London. That and watching Monty Python provided exactly the proper training to spot a documercial from over a foot away. The best commercials... tell a story. Story doesn't have to be a fictional narrative- the basic form is beginning, middle, and end. E.g. the setup with a challenge, the journey to overcome, and success/salvation/coming home (Hero's Journey). A boring cat video / camera test could become the quest to catch the cat doing that funny thing they won't do on camera, etc. A little effort can have big payoffs. *beautiful little town and Warwick Castle is pretty cool too, esp. the fireball What if Kubrick or <insert favorite director here> said "I'm not going to make movies because others suck at it?". The guys at DigitalRev make entertaining camera tests- they tell a story, however simple, and make jokes which creates an entertaining camera test: http://tv.digitalrev.com/v/uXpDOS4wTkg .

Documentaries tell a story too: all good content tells some kind of story. Test videos or 'art videos' have a very limited audience to the general public. To be honest, calling something 'art' when it's a random jumble of incoherent shots is a cop out. True art tells a story and evokes emotion in a way that words alone cannot. Telling a good story isn't easy, that's why most content leaves us unfulfilled. My first short (which I co-wrote) wasn't very good, as the story was weak. All great filmmakers say the same thing: keep making movies, the first ones won't be very good and don't give up. You'll get better by making more. If one doesn't continue to make more, and learn from each until they are good, then they are stuck where they quit. If one is making a filmed work and not thinking about story, they are missing out on the most important element. Just a little bit of story makes the work much better (even wedding videos, a soccer game, etc.). Save the Cat explains 'the physics of storytelling' and it's right on: http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp/1932907009 . If you add story to your next test video / review, it will be much better / easier to watch. Sure it's more work and planning, but well worth the effort. Which reminds me, I need to re-read Save the Cat Her story resonates with me- she was a teacher and also worked some kind of corporate job ('interior office'). After she had her daughter and having learned the basics of pottery she decided to take a risk and start her own business doing what she loved. And she succeeded, which is very rare, starting a business from nothing with no experience and becoming successful on the first go (profitable) . In the end it's more work than a corporate office job, but since she loves what she's doing it's not really work. Doing what you love and getting paid for it, isn't that what everyone wants? That's an inspiring story. Our current project involves interviews which on their own can be boring unless watched by a very small relevant market. So we're adding fun cutaways / animations / graphics to make it more entertaining for a wider audience. What's boring to you may be very interesting to someone else (for example anyone interested in starting their own business, entrepreneurs etc., may find the pottery piece interesting as it involves doing what one loves, art, creativity, recycling, and making enough money to not have to work a corporate job). The pottery piece also shows the 1DX II works well as a doc / short / advertorial camera. Sure, the 1DX II highlights blow out earlier than we'd like (I'll compare to the C300 II's Canon Log 2 at some point (much better than CLog, though requires 10 or more bits)). However I doubt a single non-camera-person consumer would ever notice blown highlights when the subject is properly exposed (they've seen blown highlights for years). IIRC, shooting with highlights at 80 IRE on the WFM (sunlight on a white fence, subject in shadow) with the C300 II resulted in blown highlights which I couldn't fully recover in post with PP CC. My background is image/graphics software and tech (not a camera operator), and intuitively 80 IRE should have been recoverable (where 100 IRE is 'max voltage'/signal value). Guess I'm missing something or there's an issue with PP CC. The point is even the mighty C300 II with Canon Log 2 will clip highlights if care is not taken (need to shoot tests to understand highlight clipping behavior). The 1DX II's strengths are very good color reproduction, including pleasing skin tones, very good (but not perfect by a long shot) PDAF, very nice 4K (and 4K 60p), decent audio preamps, and native Canon lens support without adapters. It's so nice to get footage straight from camera that needs little or no tweaking- that's why we skipped the FS7, FS5, etc. We're voting with our dollars: we're not spending any more money on cameras with poor color science (regardless of bells and whistles).

He used the camera to shoot a mini-doc, he told a story; I think he did a pretty good job. Then he discussed how it performed doing the job. A flip out screen would be nice, sounded more like a wish list item (something like a SmallHD 502 effectively solves the need). I stopped using 1080 on the 1DX II as the quality is so much better in 4K (and scaled to 1080p for 1080p projects). The tradeoff is less recording time and storage costs (though minimal as hard drives are so cheap). I haven't even tried 1080p 120 (60 slowed to 24 (2.5x) is good enough. Still have the FS700 for up to 240, but we just haven't needed it (probably sell it soon). The A7S II does decent 1080p 120. The 1DX II's 1080p 120 might be OK for a face close up (similar to 5D3 H.264 resolution, but with aliasing). What is the value of a forum post? Does it contribute knowledge to the community, does it help people, does it solve a problem? Were you ironically joking with the ego comment? Pure technical tests are helpful, as you like to do to and adding a storytelling component where the camera is used in production is even more valuable.

Excellent shots, especially the extreme close ups!

The ~$100 Canon AC Adapter Kit ACK-E4 from the 1DX works fine in the 1DX II for video, including 4K 60p. The 1DX II's AC Adapter AC-E19 ($400) + DR-E19 DC Coupler ($250) = $650 provides higher speed stills (similar to the 1DX vs. 1DX II batteries).

Consumer cameras provide 8-bit 420, Professional cameras provide 10+ bit and 422, 444 H.264.

Was referring to the latest Pro 10- and 12-bit 422 and 444 H.264 codecs. They are superior to ProRes in terms of quality and bitrate. They are more CPU expensive to decode, though H.264 tends to be GPU accelerated.

The 1DX II seems to have a lot more red noise in the shadows (especially when shooting outdoors, perhaps IR related).

The Alexa is still king as the Alev III sensor is still the best tech available (designed by Cypress semiconductor, now part of On Semiconductor). It's heavily patented, thus not easy to compete via 'low hanging fruit' (e.g dual voltage sensor read out for high DR low noise). We considered the Amira and Mini, however Canon's PDAF is very useful for our kind of work, and frankly ProRes is ancient tech compared to the latest H.264 codecs (ALL-I and IPB). It's very useful for long-format live shoots to have lower bitrates with very high quality, which H.264 can provide and ProRes cannot. ARRI hardware is very, very power hungry, using custom FPGAs and perhaps not having Sony, Canon, and Panasonic's more advanced VLSI ASICs tech/fabs to reduce power requirements. This means when no AC is available, many large and expensive batteries are required. ARRI is kind of like Ferrari- top of the line, but with significant support costs to operate (don't ask what a brake job costs on a Ferrari with carbon-ceramic brakes (rotors & pads: $30K)). It's interesting to note that most external recorders don't support the Pro H.264 codecs (10-12 bit, ALL-I and IPB). Video Devices just added H.264 support: http://www.videodevices.com/products/portable-video-recorders/pix-e5 . This is a welcome addition, however the bitrate is very low (10Mbps, probably 420 8-bit). So cameras like the C300 II with PDAF are currently in a sweet spot: near ARRI color and DR, but with PDAF, much lower energy/support costs, and super-high quality 50Mbps 422 10-bit 1080p. The FS7 is also pretty good with color vs. ARRI, has small H.264 files, but no PDAF (the next Sony will likely have this feature). For low light shoots, the A7S II is currently an unmatched value (the Varicam/LT is probably the best pro-level low-light camera for the money right now).

Daylight 4K 60p test (Clog emulation + HTP):

Good question. The 1DX II's sensor has more DR (about 2 stops? (~14 vs. ~12?)). The C100 II creates small very high quality 1080p while the 1DX II creates very large 4K files (1DX II's 1080p isn't nearly the quality of the C100 II's 1080p, however it's still pretty good and is full frame (vs. 1.5 crop)). Since a test was done showing the 1DC using HTP and exposed -1 EV performed similarly to CLog, the 1DX II may have a slight DR advantage over the C100 II, though NR may be needed when bringing up the shadows in post (or fixing them when using a log-like picture profile) as I did in this shot.

Yes

Dynamic range test- shaded dark complexion backlit with bright sky: slight clipping on histogram during shoot, noisy shadows (using my custom log-ish profile with HTP): Processed in Premiere CC (including Neat Video for NR, then added a little noise and local contrast), then Photoshopped a bit more (going for intense colors- tends to be easier to do on Canon devices): For a real shoot would be best to add some fill light.

Yes, the 1DX II's touch screen PDAF is very useful. The tracking is decent, though appears to use some form of feature/corner tracking such that when the object changes significantly, it completely loses track of the object. For example, I was filming a show dog walking on hind legs and spinning. After locking track on his face, when he fell down, the track was completely lost and focus immediately went to the background. This ruins the shot. Instead, the algorithm should default to tracking near the last track at the same spatial depth (the dog was still in focus- it should have stayed and picked up a new track based on the pixels already in focus). I write image processing algorithms for my day job, and I'm surprised they didn't implement it the right way. We also use the C300 II, and I'm finding the 1DX II more useful for location shoots as it's much smaller and lighter than the C300 II (fully rigged with top and side handles). In 4K, the 1DX II is also a 1.33 crop vs 1.5 for the C300 II (1DX II is FF in 1080p). While the C300 II has Canon Log 2, which produces ARRI-like highlight handling (and along with other settings has similar colors so ARRI 3D LUTs can be used etc.), it cannot do touch-screen AF as with the 1DX II. However, it can do WIFI device touch AF with the WFT-E6A (the 1DX II requires the newer WFT-E8). One nice thing about the C300 II is the 1080p is excellent, and the 50Mbps IPB is not only very small, but still looks great for low-camera motion shots. The 1DX II's 30Mbps 1080p is good, but not really 1080p (perhaps someone will do resolution tests) and has aliasing and Moire (note the C300 II has aliasing and Moire on very fine detail fabrics, for example. Something else to look forward to improvement for the next cameras (capturing at 8K (or more) and filtered down-sampling to reduce and/or eliminate aliasing). In summary, the C300 II is a superior camera to the 1DC in every way (except perhaps size/stealth and crop factor), and we find the 1DX II to be a superior camera than the C300 II for certain types of shoots. The 1DC is still an amazing camera, however the 1DX II is superior in real-world shooting (remember shooting -1EV + using a log-like profile (Cinestyle or your own) + HTP gets you the same level of highlight detail as the 1DC in CLog (see earlier post in this thread showing the results in actual video with the 1DC). PDAF is indeed a massive help for focus, but still needs work (could be improved via firmware, though Canon doesn't do firmware updates very often). For the show dog example, manual focusing with a single operator (handheld) is nearly impossible as both zoom and focus must be done at the same time (with a balanced shoulder rig and lots of practice it should be possible, however will never be as good as a computer (when the software works properly ;)).

The 1DX II can shoot very flat with either Cinestyle or a custom PP as I created here: You can edit this profile I created to match Cinestyle, for example add slightly more boost to the shadows, lower saturation, perhaps remove my red and yellow saturation pulls, etc. Getting 0-255 with the gamma curve editor is tricky: both mine and Cinestyle start above 0, so the resulting curve doesn't go 'crazy' (a Bezier curve continuity thing). Mine also drops the max value to less than 255 (could be 16-235-ish). Definitely both my custom profile and Cinestyle raise shadows enough to see noise, and significantly pull highlights to reduce clipping. In my brief tests with CLog on the C300 II, highlights still clipped harshly. Only when using Canon Log 2 did highlight clipping reduce significantly. Super flat profiles work best with 10- or more bits. I see material ranging from TV/Netflix/AppleTV/AmazonPrime to movies where highlights are blown out- this happens even on the Alexa (though the transition tends to be nicer). The average viewer will never notice, and most film people focussed on story (and profit) could care less. "Our profits are down because the film's highlights weren't quite as smooth as <insert camera here>" is highly unlikely to ever be said in the real world. Since the 1DX II is so clean in the shadows, as seen in Andree Markefor's video on this page, if we expose -1 EV (1 stop down), and use HTP and a custom flat profile, we can easily boost shadows +1EV in post without a major noise issue. Thus I don't see an issue with CLog not being available on the 1DX II vs. the 1DC. Note we shoot +1.7-2 EV on the A7S II to get the best results with SLog2. A minor issue is that -1 EV may be a little harder to see, however most people using the 1DX II will be using the amazing PDAF for focusing. I would expect a 1DC II to have 10-bit and Canon Log 2, otherwise I don't see the value if the only difference is Clog (and still 8-bit). 1DC vs. 1DX II is a no brainer: 1DX II (since it can match CLog by using a custom flat profile + HTP + -1 EV exposure). That is if shooting 4K. 1080p is fairly crude by comparison (but fine for online delivery and perhaps 'B' shots).

Not as good as C100, better than 5D3 (based on using the 5D3, C300 II, 1DX II). While sharper than 5D3, has aliasing and sharpening halos on edges (not as sharp as 5D3 ML RAW). I initially shot 1080p, but switched to 4K (even when delivering 1080p) as the difference in quality is major between 1080p and 4K downscaled to 1080p in post. The tradeoff is long-term hard drive cost. C300 II 1080p is very sharp and usable (50Mbps IPB), though can alias on very fine detail (haven't see that on 1DX II 4K scaled to 1080p yet).

Nothing do to with mojo, almost exactly the same as 709: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601

The 1DX II can shoot 16 fps continuous RAW (mirror up- Live View), at full resolution: 5472x3648 (5K). Add 50% Twixtor (etc.) to bring to 24fps. Could use ACR to get full DR and color etc. Could be useful for some shorter shots where max detail and DR is needed.

Full 4K max quality JPG: http://www.brightland.com/t/JacquiTree2b4K.jpg

I found the latest version of Canon's PS editor, 1.16.20 to be OK. I made the curve intuitively, and pulled red and yellow saturation down a bit. You can edit it.

4K 60p frame grab using my CLog emulation, colored in PP CC, then enhanced as I would a still in PS when going for max saturation/pop.

If you can stretch the budget, the Audix SCX-1 HC is great. We use them with the Schoeps CMC641 and they cut perfectly. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/242661-REG/Audix_SCX1_HC_SCX1_HC_Microphone.html