C 300 launch in Canada

[Nigel Akam]

The last couple of weeks I've been working on a little film for the Canadian launch of the Canon C 300. We wanted to show the camera in different shooting environments, with different ISO's and highlighting the use of a variety of EOS lenses. We ended up using a thread with the red ball. It was edited on FCP 7, media managed and ingested into the Davinci Resolve suite at Post Producers Digital in Toronto. Graded and output to HDcam. Composer Jordan O'Connor whipped up a beautiful score in a couple of days, and had lots for help from some of my regular crew, as well as a talented young rhythmic gymnast, and one of our women's national soccer team members. There's also nothing like telling one of your grips he would make a great drifter. Dave played along, got into the role, and was brilliant. There are a lot of closet actors behind the scenes.

We had a short turnaround from concept to final output. We showed it in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Its looked great from Blu Ray on 46" LCD's in the trade show area, to the DCP output we did for the theatres. I was blown away how great it projected at the TIFF Lightbox theatre in Toronto. It was a lot of fun travelling across the country with the crew from Canon Canada, and being on the panel with Vincent Laforet and Alex Buono.

Please note that it is compressed from Final cut pro to upload to Vimeo. Behind the scenes pics on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/5661256...7628200062793/

la balle rouge on Vimeo

[Chris Hurd]

Well done -- thanks for sharing this, Nigel!

[Thierry Humeau]

Hey Nigel,

Great work! What CP (Custom Picture) profile did you use? Did you use Canon Log?

Best,

[Nigel Akam]

FIt was all shot in Canon log and graded in a Davinci Resolve suite

N

[Robert Sanders]

At this rate it seems everyone on the planet got pre-production models to play with. Envy is a sin, I know.

[Charles Papert]

Thank you Nigel for not only great imagery but ID'ing each shot with ISO, something I sorely missed from the videos made for the rollout event, which rendered them all but useless for me.

From your experiences in the post suite as well as projected, what do you feel is the maximum ISO you feel comfortable with before noise becomes apparent? Obviously, this is subjective--a little bit isn't a deal-killer, but I'm suggesting the threshold where noise becomes noticeable, giving away a low-light environment. Did you do any de-noising in post?

[Chris Medico]

Nicely done!

[Simon Denny]

Hi Nigel,

Great work. Quick question... what's the Casio TV screen you are using to monitor is see on Flickr, img 1956.

Cheers

[Justin Molush]

ISO16000 looks very clean in the footage - pretty impressed.

I also heard though, that the ISO scaling on the C300 isn't the same as other Canon DSLRs? Not sure if this is true or not (it could be some junk I read online just post launch for all I know) but would like to find out.

[Nigel Akam]

Originally Posted by Charles Papert

Thank you Nigel for not only great imagery but ID'ing each shot with ISO, something I sorely missed from the videos made for the rollout event, which rendered them all but useless for me.

From your experiences in the post suite as well as projected, what do you feel is the maximum ISO you feel comfortable with before noise becomes apparent? Obviously, this is subjective--a little bit isn't a deal-killer, but I'm suggesting the threshold where noise becomes noticeable, giving away a low-light environment. Did you do any de-noising in post?

Thanks Charles.

We saw that there's not a huge difference in grain structure up to 6400 ISO, but our skyline shots were at 8000 and 10 000, and were very useable. I was most impressed with the 16 000 ISO. It really felt like a film grain. The way this sensor works, how you get full RBG colours, no debayering, and not having a fixed pattern noise shows through. You could see the grain, and the one shot tilting up from the ball to the face in the alley was really pushing it I think. The shot where our "drifter" walks down the alley is backlit by a streetlight, and I think that really shows the 16 000 ISO working well. I did a test of de-noising using Neat Video in our edit suite, and we just used it to take the edge off the 16 000 ISO. We didn't keep it for the final version, because we wanted to show what the high ISO would look like.

It was impressive projected at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto on the 30 ish wide screen. Even the projectionist and their staff were blown away how good it looked. They asked to keep a copy of the DCP file. We've become very used to seeing very sharp clean images from the cameras out there. I think the C 300 adds that other element of a nice grain that we haven't seen before.

[Nigel Akam]

Originally Posted by Simon Denny

Hi Nigel,

Great work. Quick question... what's the Casio TV screen you are using to monitor is see on Flickr, img 1956.

Cheers

Thanks Simon. Yes that's a Casio LCD TV. We had the C 300 on a remote controlled car. We couldn't add any wireless follow focus because of the weight, and the only video transmitter we had was an SD one. So we had a downconverted signal off the camera that we could pick up off the air on the Casio.

We got lucky and were able to get the car and speed of the ball consistent on the second take, so we didn't lose focus. Those old SD toys still come in handy every now and then.