The Canon C300 Mark II has been shipping for the past few weeks and we've delivered quite a few to our customers already. The latest Canon C300 II is a major departure from the predecessor in terms of internal recording resolutions, choice of codecs outputs, and some major design improvements designed to make the lives of cinematographers on set much easier. The new C300 Mark II is a full-fledged 4K professional camera with an impressive 10bit 422 internal codec recording in 4K as well as 2K 12bit 444 for productions requiring extensive VFX and grading work. Swiss production company Lauschsicht recently took out the Canon C300 Mark II on shoot for Swiss Airlines and fell in love with the camera.
We’ve been shooting with the new Canon EOS C300 Mark II for the past four weeks. This is what we discovered so far: https://lauschsicht.com/canon-eos-c300-mark-ii-review/ We produced more than 16 movies for SWISS International Air Lines during the past two years. This time, the focus is on the people behind the airline. Its about the faces, the departments, the vast variety of different jobs. After reviewing a list of about 900 different positions, we came up with a story that involves 35 different departments. The final piece will be around 3min and more than 120 people will appear in that short amount of time. Credits Making-of Camera: Marius Thut / Manuel Wenk Note We didn't use any 4K material in this edit, just 5D Mark III H264 and a few C300 MK2 proxy shots.
[caption id="attachment_1469" align="aligncenter" width="750"]Canon C300 Mark II Slider Image by Lauschsicht[/caption] The team at Lauschsicht had the camera for about 2 weeks and were quite impressed with the form factor having already been familiar with the C300 and the Canon 5D DSLR style cameras. The internal 4K XF-AVC codec at 410 Mb/s is quite robust and allowed them to get some stunning images by using Canon Log2 and C.Gammut. See an example of before and after the grade: [caption id="attachment_1470" align="aligncenter" width="750"]c300markii-01-ungraded-940x496 Image by Lauschsicht[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1471" align="aligncenter" width="750"]c300markii-01-graded-940x496 Image by Lauschsicht[/caption]
It feels like home. The skin tones are beautiful, the dynamic range impressive, the details in the highlights and shadows are all there. At the moment I would give the advice to not underexpose! Maybe even go a little higher than you usually would. The new LOG2 and C.Gamma are impressive and might give the impression of crazy shadow detail, but be careful, it’s a bit noisy down there. I would strongly advice some good testing before a shoot. We tent to overexpose slightly, without burning the highlights out of course.
[caption id="attachment_1473" align="aligncenter" width="750"]Canon C300 MkII first impressions Image by Lauschsicht[/caption] They also enjoyed the improved Dual Pixel Autofocus quite a bit - "...The Autofocus is insane! I did not expect this at all. I would say it’s nearly perfect. It’s precise, fast and has this amazing Boosted MF Option. You make a focus pull and it does the last bit. It tracks faces, has great options about speed and response time. It allowed us to do things we could not do before. We work without a focus puller (most of the time) and we love using a gimbal. " Of course no camera is perfect, and neither is the Canon C300 Mark II. Some of the areas of improvement, Lauschsicht pointed out in their review is the inability to move the Waveform monitor from the top right corner of the LCD screen. In addition, the Monitor SDI and HDMI outputs are connected, so if you want to record externally via the HDMI and monitor with overlays via SDI you will be recording those overlays, so be careful with that. To read the full review head over to their website here. To place your order for the Canon C300 MK II click here or give us a bell at 0208 977 1222.