1DX Mk II video

[mercer]

16 hours ago, tomsemiterrific said:

Looking forward to the review. I just bit the bullet and ordered one from BH. But speaking of reviews, have you given up on the promised XC10 review??? I've been looking forward to that review. Have the XC15s arrived in Deutschland?

Your C-log works a treat. Put several folks on to it.

Did you ever sell your 80D?

[myJTP]

5 hours ago, Oliver Daniel said:

 

Awesome - thanks for the info. 

The important thing for me is how the camera operates with a 5" SmallHD 501 and whether the the 4k footage can be pushed to look, ahem "organic, cinematic, filmic"... y'know, those words we use to describe the feel of a cinematic image. 

The camera works perfectly with the 501.  I did a shoot with it a month ago and used the Small HD 501 on top of my ronin to help me check focus while the camera was flying low.

[tomsemiterrific]

7 hours ago, mercer said:

Did you ever sell your 80D?

Yes, I did. I also sold my XC10 to help pay for the 1dx2. Now, I'm waiting for the XC15 to arrive I prepaid to B&H.

 

[mercer]

43 minutes ago, tomsemiterrific said:

Yes, I did. I also sold my XC10 to help pay for the 1dx2. Now, I'm waiting for the XC15 to arrive I prepaid to B&H.

 

Dang, Canon should offer you buy one get one free. 

[Asmundma]

On 9/20/2016 at 3:09 PM, Andrew Reid said:

The ergonomics for stills stand out vs the A7S II, much nicer. For video the live-view experience is a big improvement with much higher frame rate screen, very quick to switch between video and stills mode on a lever, very quick to pause the AF by pressing a function button (either toggle or hold) or lock onto a subject simply by pressing the touch screen. The AF system on this camera is the best I've ever used be it video or stills, it rocks in both. Dual Pixel AF is an absolute bomb. It recognises faces in near darkness even when you can't see them yourself on the screen. It never seems to slow down much even in low light. Even at F1.2 on my beloved EF 50mm F1.2L it does a very good job so you barely have to think about focus. Not used manual focus on it yet ONCE.

The automatic white balance maintains a warm naturalness to scenes with mixed indoor / outdoor lights, very nice indeed and never seems too cold or clinical. Colour is astounding on this camera.

The 120fps quality is good for that kind of frame rate, and it is full frame. Better than the A7S II 120fps. It is almost the same quality as the 1080/24p. The 1080/24p is as detailed as the 1D C's full frame 1080/24p but without the moire correction.

Not tried the HDMI output yet but has option for 1080/60/50p in the menu, so should do nice 1080/60p 1.3x crop when set to 4K 60p mode in-cam.

4K image quality is as you'd expect

Fucking good.

The file sizes are a downside as is the moire in full frame video mode 1080p. I used to shoot a lot of 1080p on the 1D C to get around the massive MJPEG codec.

Rolling shutter MUCH less than A7S II and 1D C in 4K!

Will say a lot more in the review, as only had the camera for 2 days! Bought it in Berlin at a store brand new.

Same experience here, better video then A7s2 and A7r2 which I also have. Be aware nose from some Canon lenses in video mode. 

[tomsemiterrific]

4 hours ago, mercer said:

Dang, Canon should offer you buy one get one free. 

If they did I'd just take the free one and let someone else pay for the other. 

[Oliver Daniel]

20 hours ago, myJTP said:

The camera works perfectly with the 501.  I did a shoot with it a month ago and used the Small HD 501 on top of my ronin to help me check focus while the camera was flying low.

I'm having a major camera overhaul to cover various types of needs - my work has got a lot more mixed this year and I'm finding the requirement for a more versatile set of tools, on hand at any time. 

I've been doing my research and I'm not convinced the 1DX II is the right choice at this time. 

[lwestfall]

Wow, 1DX II resolution looks horrible here compared to the 4k resolution king a6300:

https://***URL removed***/reviews/image-comparison/fullscreen?attr29_0=canon_eos1dxii&attr29_1=sony_a6300&attr72_0=c4k&attr72_1=4k&normalization=full&widget=369&x=0.4158286635449449&y=-0.1637596899224805

[DBounce]

25 minutes ago, lwestfall said:

Wow, 1DX II resolution looks horrible here compared to the 4k resolution king a6300:

https://***URL removed***/reviews/image-comparison/fullscreen?attr29_0=canon_eos1dxii&attr29_1=sony_a6300&attr72_0=c4k&attr72_1=4k&normalization=full&widget=369&x=0.4158286635449449&y=-0.1637596899224805

Indeed, you should run right out and snap up a a6300. It's the best camera in the world. I know I'll be selling my 1DXMkii to get one  or maybe just stop worrying about charts and look at some real world results?

[lwestfall]

Obviously the 1DX II blows the a6300 away in numerous other ways. I just didn't realize till recently the technical difference they have in resolution was so huge. Even with significant sharpening of the natively unsharpened 1DX II image, you can tell the 6k-to-4k oversampling of the a6300 still delivers so much more detail. It's a shame to see the notorious soft Canon demosaicing present even in the 1DX II where I thought Canon pulled out all the stops. And I wonder when anyone other than Sony (and Samsung with the NX1 which doesn't quite match the a6300) will offer that apparent revolution-for-4k-resolution feature of 6k-to-4k oversampling of full sensor readout... (and without overheating. )

[lwestfall]

Anyone have both (and an EF adapter) to do a direct comparison? 

[hmcindie]

I own the a6300. And I'm more awed by those 'resolution comparison' scenes than when I actually shoot my own material and look at it. When you shoot a little narrative thing, you're not looking at the little "details" that much, everything else comes before.

[Taranis]

6 hours ago, DBounce said:

Indeed, you should run right out and snap up a a6300. It's the best camera in the world. I know I'll be selling my 1DXMkii to get one  or maybe just stop worrying about charts and look at some real world results?

He was talking about details and details only. So if you're top priority is details for some reason, the real world results will show the same. The 1DXMKII is considerably softer. This is just a fact, no need to defend the 1DXII, as it obviously outperforms the A6300 in many other ways.

[jcs]

One of the reasons models, actors, and clients like Canon, and they don't really know why, is that it is softer, and when there is no visible aliasing, looks more like film. A very sharp still image can look great for a landscape or a young model/actor with perfect makeup (or Photoshop). Otherwise 'just enough detail' is best along with zero digital artifacts- looks organic/analog. Additionally, when a very sharp image moves the pixels will 'dance' and the resulting effect is a kind of temporal aliasing, which looks more like video than film. Slightly Gaussian blurring a sharp video then adding film grain can help reduce the temporal aliasing, since the noise is random and not associated with camera/scene element movement.

At the highest end of cinema film production, they use various forms of diffusion/softening filters all the time on ARRI, RED, F55/65 especially when filming close ups (these filters can of course be used on any production; we use a Tiffen Black Pro Mist (you can also use a pantyhose)).

[mkabi]

39 minutes ago, jcs said:

One of the reasons models, actors, and clients like Canon, and they don't really know why, is that it is softer, and when there is no visible aliasing, looks more like film. A very sharp still image can look great for a landscape or a young model/actor with perfect makeup (or Photoshop). Otherwise 'just enough detail' is best along with zero digital artifacts- looks organic/analog. Additionally, when a very sharp image moves the pixels will 'dance' and the resulting effect is a kind of temporal aliasing, which looks more like video than film. Slightly Gaussian blurring a sharp video then adding film grain can help reduce the temporal aliasing, since the noise is random and not associated with camera/scene element movement.

At the highest end of cinema film production, they use various forms of diffusion/softening filters all the time on ARRI, RED, F55/65 especially when filming close ups (these filters can of course be used on any production; we use a Tiffen Black Pro Mist (you can also use a pantyhose)).

Well... in this situation... a lot of people will ask... why even? When you are applying the diffusion/softening filters anyway, right?

Well, I think you would want an option to choose, correct? Have that super sharp look for when you have foliage, landscape, and young super slick skin...

And, when you shoot the wrinkled ones, you can add that filter when you want, not when the camera wants....

[jcs]

3 hours ago, mkabi said:

Well... in this situation... a lot of people will ask... why even? When you are applying the diffusion/softening filters anyway, right?

Well, I think you would want an option to choose, correct? Have that super sharp look for when you have foliage, landscape, and young super slick skin...

And, when you shoot the wrinkled ones, you can add that filter when you want, not when the camera wants....

More options are of course better. Canon is very popular because of the way people and skin tones look. Most consumers don't really know or care about resolution/sharpness. As long as it's not super blurry, they'll be happy or won't notice. A lot of movies shot on film look very soft compared to current digital acquisition. However the film grain creates pleasing texture and a kind of false detail that doesn't look like digital aliasing- very organic.

I just shot a red carpet event in Hollywood on the A7S II and it looked pretty good once the WB and custom profile were carefully set (Cine2 with SGamut3.cine color + other tweaks). Hours of footage were shot and the client appreciated the low light performance, skin tones looked pretty good (matched fairly well to what I saw live), and the files were very small. However in post there's not much flexibility to grade, and as others have noted Sony still looks more like video than Canon. If the 1DX II shot better 1080p I would have used it for the interviews on the red carpet (well lit with ARRI lights) because people really do look better with Canon/ARRI and celebrities are very sensitive about how they look. For shorter events and/or with a DIT running memory card dumps, 1DX II 4K would have looked amazing, especially for the files sizes compared to the RED that was shooting RAW (he also had major /battery/power/boot up time/ limitations for a live event).

The theater shots were very low light; nothing can touch the A7S II right now in that situation (so I would have had to bring two cameras). An A7S III with better IBIS, Sony's '4D' AF closer to Canon's PDAF, and skin tones close enough to Canon/ARRI, will make a lot of people very happy. Right now there's nothing on the market that can compete with what the 1DX II can provide: amazing skin tones, sharp/detailed enough 4K (even though not really resolving 4K of detail), market leading AF (PDAF), amazing automatic white balance* (useful in mixed lighting and live/docu events), native EF lens support with PDAF (no fiddly adapters without usable AF), very high reliability, very short boot time, and a decent balance of 4K image quality and file size (compared to say a RED).

* it's possible Canon is looking for faces/skintones and optimizing WB for skin at the expense of other colors (which makes for example strong reds and blues to look quite different). Latest Canon cameras can optimize for 'ambient' WB as well as the traditional method (whites).

[Matthew19]

Canon anyone comment on if the 1DXII can record 4k 24p to the same 1000x CF cards that the 1DC can for sustained amounts of time.

[myJTP]

1 hour ago, Matthew19 said:

Canon anyone comment on if the 1DXII can record 4k 24p to the same 1000x CF cards that the 1DC can for sustained amounts of time.

The 1066x cards work just fine in the 1Dx2 for 4K24  They also work for about 3 seconds in 4K60 but then it stops due to buffer. So you can get some quick b-roll if you are in a pinch and ran out of CFast cards

[JurijTurnsek]

Can't you soften up the footage in post? I'd love to have as much detail as possible in my home videos, but I agree that make up artists probably dread it.

[independent]

Depending on budget and the demands of the shoot, the 6300 could be a great option or a terrible one. Same with the 1DX II, A7R II, or A7S II. None of those cameras are bad, they all have appropriate situations.

And resolution isn't the only factor for flattering actors. For one, talent with good skin. It's a cruel business. Next, makeup artists, lighting, focal length, shooting distance, lens characteristics, filters.