I wanted to share a bit my first experience with the 1Dx II from a usability point of view.
I have the 1Dx II since a week and I’m coming from the 1Dx. I shoot mostly sport and action stuff, around 70% photos and the rest video. This camera is really made for people like me that with a single tool can cover most of my needs.
Image quality was already discussed many times so I have nothing to add here other than confirm that at 4k 60fps the quality is very good but the HD one is nothing to write home. 120fps is usable but not great.
What it really shines is the DPAF, I use a lot the Ronin M and for the first time I’m able to shoot wide open with myself and the subject moving even erratically. I just did a test film with trial bike with the Ronin M and using the 24 1.4 always at 1.4 and most of the shoots came out great. When It was OOF was mostly my mistake in not keeping the athlete within the focus point. I will need to practice more and I will also play around a bit more with the Focus Lock settings. But being the first time out with DPAF, 1.4 and the Ronin I was quite impressed. Something impossible as one man band with a gimbal before.
I did not use Face tracking because I did many shoot laterally and from the back so it is not working. In this case you would need a second operator that reset the focus when the athlete looks away.
Talking from second operator I was surprised by how good is the WiFi touch focus, the latency is quite low considering is WiFi and the frame rate good enough. It is so simple that you can give a tablet to a non “qualified” assistant and he can do the job.
With the extension rod the camera balances very well on the Ronin M, in fact I found a good base balance where I can switch the lenses between 24 1.4, 16-35 2.8 and the 85 1.8 only setting the tilt axis (the easiest axis to balance by simply move the dovetail). So I can do the lens change in 30 seconds.
The “Q” button in video mode allows you to change most of the video related settings from Audio gain, AF mode, picture style, etc.. I normally shoot in M with auto iso, I have the “Set” button to enable exp compensation with the wheel but I wish there was I way to change directly without pressing the “Set” button. It would also be great to be able to change the audio gain via the other wheel. I have also created my own my menu with all the video related settings so with the “Q” and “Menu” button I’m quite fast in changing the settings. The dedicated button to have live view in video or still mode is very handy.
Another thing that I wish it was possible is to have both HDMI out and internal LCD on with the info on both monitors. Unfortunately if you have both on you can have the info only on the LCD. For gimbal usage it would be better the inverse, using the LCD just to change the focus point. Right now while on the gimbal I do it with the joystick and the LCD off. I will maybe try to use the tablet as monitor over WiFi attached on the gimbal but I’m not sure that the latency and frame rate is good enough.
The MJPEG files are big but high quality, surprisingly I can play them back even at 4k 60fps on my notebook with both the media player and canon movie software in real-time. My notebook is a i7-4810MQ CPU 2.80GHz with an NVIDIA Quadro K2100M 2GB vram and SSD. I can even do some editing with Resolve using Caching and a FullHD timeline switching back to 4k for the final rendering. Scrubbing is fast enough but no real-time playback in the edit panel. I wish Resolve would be more optimized. Alternatively you can use optimized media feature and create proxy for editing and then it works. Naturally for serious editing a workstation with the right spec is recommended.
Bottom-line for action & sport videos the combination of 4k 60fps and DPAF makes this a unique camera at the moment.
