4K RAW 120fps for £3k?! Say hello to the second-hand Canon C500

[Andrew Reid]

4 hours ago, richg101 said:

I don't know..  The image from your f35 will always be special, not to mention the motion.  I'd take fullhd upscaled to 4k from an f35 over any camera below an alexa.  what lenses are you using predominantly?

The F35 image is indeed special, but it'd be interesting to compare the uncompressed RGB 12bit of the C500 to it, since it's a very similar format to the RGB the F35 puts out, in fact on paper it appears to be superior.

I wish Sony had gone for longer making CCDs. One of the first Sony cameras I bought was an Alpha A350 stills cam back in 2008. Still stands up today, easily. Guess why... It has a Super 35mm sized (well, APS-C) CCD sensor! You can get it on eBay for 150 quid now. It has in-body stabilisation and the ergonomics aren't bad either, but of course no video. It would be interesting to use that as a way to compare modern CMOS cameras to a 'classic' 14MP CCD Super 35mm chip, especially in terms of colour.

The only issue I have with the F35 is that it is mega heavy, pretty big, rather power hungry and would exclude the use of my EF lenses. A PL mount is lovely, and would be amazing with the Cookes, but C500 + Odyssey is about as big as I'm willing to go at the moment for most stuff.

27 minutes ago, Caleb Genheimer said:

Meanwhile I've been shooting corporate stuff all day long with my Sammy NX1/Ronin M combo. No slow-mo, but the colors and resolution are gorgeous.

It does have slow-mo, the 1080/120p is pretty good.

----

By the way, there's an interesting white paper on the C500's 12bit RGB 2K here -

http://www.filmanddigitaltimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Canon-Larry_Thorpe_C500-vs-C300.pdf

It sounds like a massive leap up from the internal 8bit 1080p.

The sensor reads out 4 2048 x 1080 streams which don't need de-bayering. The 4th is a 'super green' which has zero aliasing and extended dynamic range.

This is made possible by the pixel design of the 4K sensor.

I never rated the C300's image.

C500 should be a different matter.

Well worth £3k. Well worth £5k even. Let's hope they come down even more.

[Nikkor]

Can you fit the cookes on the c500 with an adapter?

You keep posting pictures of those cookes, I think you owe us some kind of review-video 

[Andrew Reid]

No sadly even though the C500 doesn't have a mirror in the way, the PL Cookes simply won't go on any EF mount. The 44mm flange of the EF mount (distance to sensor) means there's usually only a tiny bit of space left for the PL adapter. The PL adapter must be much wider than the EF mount and have plenty of clearance inside it for the big rear of the PL lens to sit in. They will go on a PL adapter to a mirrorless mount like Micro Four Thirds or E-Mount, since the adapter can occupy much more of the gap between sensor and Cooke.

[squig]

It would be interesting to see how a $30,000 camera stacks up against a $3000 camera (5D MK3 raw). Up to 1600 ISO I don't think there'd be much in it besides the higher resolution. Beyond 1600 ISO the 5D wouldn't be able to compete due to the analog gain.

Another thing worth noting is the Adobe camera raw debayer produces a better image than the Resolve debayer so that may give the 5D CDNG files an edge in the final grade over the Canon raw files.

[Andrew Reid]

The 5D Mark III's raw is 14bit uncompressed but it comes from a pixel binned sensor readout.

It requires an optical (or maybe digital) low pass filter to reduce the jaggies, moire, etc. It is about equal in resolution to the old 5D Mark II's raw when you put the Mosaic Engineering AA filter on it.

On the other hand the C500's 2K is a 4 channel readout of 4x 2048 x 1080

Quite a bit more info.

It's not compressed, but it is clipped down to 10bit.

The 2K on the C500 is 12bit, from the same 4 channel readout and 4K sensor. Again it does not have any compression. The colour space is full RGB too, it isn't the YUV compressed kind you find on most 10bit cameras or the GH4's 'uncompressed' HDMI output. In actual fact 'uncompressed' when it comes to HDMI is misleading because it only refers to the lack of compressed codec, which is bypassed. Important things like colour space (YUV) and sampling (4:2:2) are forms of heavy compression.

I think there will be a considerable difference between the cameras here. The 5D3 raw is good but it isn't competing with the C500 on paper at all.

Obviously the 4K raw is going to win the resolution battle. The dynamic range is likely going to be similar though.

The 2K will be much cleaner and more detailed from the C500.

The uncompressed RGB 444 mode will be easier to work with in post than raw in terms of just putting stuff straight into the edit.

Not $27,000 more, but definitely worth its current used price if you want to step up from Magic Lantern.

[squig]

The 5D MK3 has an OLPF. I've never seen a frame with any aliasing or moire. As for the resolution it's just about perfect for narrative filmmaking even after denoising in ACR. 2.5k would be perfect. You can get around the pixel binning by shooting full sensor in crop mode but there's a bit of a noise penalty. I wouldn't shoot 4k narrative without filters; too harsh. Plus I'd need 50 terabytes of storage to shoot a feature! It's a shame the C500 doesn't record 2k or 2.5k raw internally.

[Oliver Daniel]

8 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Actually the Terra has ignored me.

I'd love to try one out in Berlin at some point, I can't buy absolutely everything just to review it.

Haha, fair enough. 

It's a very intriguing prospect though, no doubt. 

Hooe the C500 works out, looking forward to hearing a report on ergonomics with the 7Q. And image quality of course. 

[deszmodo]

Have a Terra 5k on order - pending a trip to bejing to test it out - end of July they informed me - pushed back a month...so far....will let you know how it goes.

[zerocool22]

yeah What I love about these canon cinema camera's is the Internal ND's. They are just so damned easy to use on the field. 
People always disregard the C100, but is almost the same image as the C300. The c100 combined with a external recorder, the image is the same as the C300.(the only thing that sucks on the c100 is the screen and the viewfinder, but when you use a external monitor you got that sorted out. But you do kinda need to drag the external recorder/monitor along which not suit all needs + the lack of 60fps) And the c500 internal image is basically the came as the c300 without a external recorder. 

[cpc]

10 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

It's not compressed, but it is clipped down to 10bit.

Andrew, c500 raw isn't clipped, clipping would kill a few of the darkest stops. It's C-log encoded into 10 bits, similar to how Arriraw is LogC encoded into 12 bits. This preserve all the tonal resolution in the darks but compresses the extreme linear tonal resolution in the whites. A neat way to save a bit of space without any noticeable loss of quality.

[Nikkor]

17 minutes ago, cpc said:

Andrew, c500 raw isn't clipped, clipping would kill a few of the darkest stops. It's C-log encoded into 10 bits, similar to how Arriraw is LogC encoded into 12 bits. This preserve all the tonal resolution in the darks but compresses the extreme linear tonal resolution in the whites. A neat way to save a bit of space without any noticeable loss of quality.

Does this mean, the camera does not debayer, but instead of linear data per pixel with 14bits, it's converted to 10bits in a log space. So in the end it acts like standard raw, with compressed higher values like you said?

[visionrouge]

So many article here bashing Canon, but happy to see how you end buying most of their product for real work.

 

I love my C300 so much that a C500 will be a perfect b camera for interview setup and a next step to 4K.

 

Well done article describing the real situation of the market now.

Sony is way to fragile to follow.

Canon is a tank and will last..

[cpc]

1 minute ago, Nikkor said:

Does this mean, the camera does not debayer, but instead of linear data per pixel with 14bits, it's converted to 10bits in a log space. So in the end it acts like standard raw, with compressed higher values like you said?

Exactly.

Even after whites compression there is still plenty of tonal info in there (more values per stop than in Cineon film scans, for example).

[Shield3]

11 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

The 5D Mark III's raw is 14bit uncompressed but it comes from a pixel binned sensor readout.

It requires an optical (or maybe digital) low pass filter to reduce the jaggies, moire, etc. It is about equal in resolution to the old 5D Mark II's raw when you put the Mosaic Engineering AA filter on it.

On the other hand the C500's 2K is a 4 channel readout of 4x 2048 x 1080

Quite a bit more info.

It's not compressed, but it is clipped down to 10bit.

The 2K on the C500 is 12bit, from the same 4 channel readout and 4K sensor. Again it does not have any compression. The colour space is full RGB too, it isn't the YUV compressed kind you find on most 10bit cameras or the GH4's 'uncompressed' HDMI output. In actual fact 'uncompressed' when it comes to HDMI is misleading because it only refers to the lack of compressed codec, which is bypassed. Important things like colour space (YUV) and sampling (4:2:2) are forms of heavy compression.

I think there will be a considerable difference between the cameras here. The 5D3 raw is good but it isn't competing with the C500 on paper at all.

Obviously the 4K raw is going to win the resolution battle. The dynamic range is likely going to be similar though.

The 2K will be much cleaner and more detailed from the C500.

The uncompressed RGB 444 mode will be easier to work with in post than raw in terms of just putting stuff straight into the edit.

Not $27,000 more, but definitely worth its current used price if you want to step up from Magic Lantern.

Sounds great, but I can shoot the 5d3 raw with one hand if I wanted to.  $1700 for a nice used one.  You'll have $8k+ in this (US dollars) with the c500 + 7q + SSD's + all the other rigging.

[zerocool22]

Yeah the 5D III RAW is something else, I really love the look of the damned thing(I do miss 1080p 60fps). Lets hope on a 4K 5D IV that will get also MAGIC LANTERN RAW.  Only the workflow and file sizes of the RAW files are such a headache. I know I wont shoot any b-roll because It eats too much damned disk space. Where the canon cinema line really puts down small files that look almost as good as the 5D III RAW files. So that is something to consider. 

[cpc]

7 minutes ago, zerocool22 said:

Yeah the 5D III RAW is something else, I really love the look of the damned thing. Only the workflow and file sizes of the RAW files are such a headache. I know I wont shoot any b-roll because It eats too much damned disk space. Where the canon cinema line really puts down small files that look almost as good as the 5D III RAW files. So that is something to consider. 

5dm3 raw storage is in the ballpark of ProRes. Now the size of an Alexa 65 raw frame... this is something else. 

[Michael Coffee]

20 hours ago, Oliver Daniel said:

I would buy the C500 if only I didn't have to have the very expensive and rather large Odyssey on top. It's not a small camera once you add that. This is what stopped me getting FS700 and FS5. 

The Kinefinity Terra 5k/6k is out this year. It's much smaller and doesn't require a bulky recorder. It has interchangeable mounts. Switchable shutters. ProRes and Raw. It also has 5k 60fps and 2k 200fps. 

Hey, the Kinifinity looks amazing - but we are talking about a camera that get's picked by DP's over Alexa's and Red's - that you could take out of a bag and start shooting with. If this had global shutter it could be the best camera in history, ha - but at about 16ms rolling shutter it's about as good as the RED's, F65's etc - I'm certain the Alexa's great rolling shutter, and global shutter is the last piece of the puzzle in having amazing, filmic cameras..

[raf702]

Cam + O7Q+ + Raw bundle. That still puts it over $6K easily

[Andrew Reid]

13 hours ago, squig said:

The 5D MK3 has an OLPF. I've never seen a frame with any aliasing or moire. As for the resolution it's just about perfect for narrative filmmaking even after denoising in ACR. 2.5k would be perfect. You can get around the pixel binning by shooting full sensor in crop mode but there's a bit of a noise penalty. I wouldn't shoot 4k narrative without filters; too harsh. Plus I'd need 50 terabytes of storage to shoot a feature! It's a shame the C500 doesn't record 2k or 2.5k raw internally.

Yes that's what I'm saying, it has an OLPF.

It's a very nice image, if you need 2K raw then it's the best bargain ever...

2 hours ago, Shield3 said:

Sounds great, but I can shoot the 5d3 raw with one hand if I wanted to.  $1700 for a nice used one.  You'll have $8k+ in this (US dollars) with the c500 + 7q + SSD's + all the other rigging.

The problem is however that it's just not robust enough for an important occasion or shoot. The other issue is the file sizes. The Odyssey remember can debayer the C500's raw and it goes straight to the SSD as ProRes LT, very small file sizes by comparison to Magic Lantern.

The 2K RGB can also go down as ProRes.

Then you can drop it straight into Premiere and put a LUT on it (that works with Canon LOG).

On a 5D Mark III shoot you in one hand for $1700 with no rigging or monitor you're squinting at a postage-stamp sized non-articulated screen with a very tricky to focus full frame sensor, hoping that the card isn't fragmented to the point where it might just stop in the middle of a critical non-repeatable shot. Then you find that the card is full after just 12 minutes and you have to ask another person on the shoot to sort it out whilst you continue to try and direct and DP all at once. Following the shoot, you then get all the raw files into DaVinci Resolve but you're reliant on a piece of software that isn't primarily designed as an editor, so you do your colour work in there and then transcode it all to ProRes for editing in Premiere. I know Resolve has improved a lot as an editor, but it's still a big shift if you're not used to it.

So what I am saying is that it's not quite as simple as $1700.

Time is also money.

2 hours ago, Nikkor said:

Does this mean, the camera does not debayer, but instead of linear data per pixel with 14bits, it's converted to 10bits in a log space. So in the end it acts like standard raw, with compressed higher values like you said?

The camera doesn't debayer the raw, just converts it to the 10bit log space for SDI transport to the recorder.

Actually I seem to remember reading that not even the 12bit RGB 2K needs debayering, due to the way the sensor is designed.

Perhaps Larry Thorpe can come on the forum and tell us how they did it.

[gnomesteel]

The more I read about the C500 the more I want one. Might try to rent one for a day or two to figure out all the quirks. One answer I can't seem to find online is the audio workflow with the 7Q. @Andrew Reid, do you know how that works? I'm assuming XLR into the C500 which passes it through to the 7Q over SDI.