Performance
Resolution
In the full-frame modes, the 1D C has to somehow downsample most of an 18-megapixel sensor to an HD image. In my “4K from Canon” article in the NAB issue of Film and Digital Times, I called it “a very credible 5D compatibility mode”, but that was a bit harsh: it’s nowhere near so aggressively alias-prone as the 5D Mk II .
Pixel-for-pixel extract from a 1D C full-frame 1080p image, DSC Labs MegaTrumpet chart.
The full-frame image is rather soft vertically, resolving perhaps 750 TV lines per picture height (TVl/ph). Horizontally it’s a bit better; diagonally, well, it depends. Practically speaking, the camera’s full-frame movies don’t leap out of the screen for their crispness, but neither do they flaunt chroma aliasing the way those from a 5D Mk II or a 7D do (I haven’t tested the 5D Mk III, so I can’t make that comparison).
Super35mm mode is a revelation:
Pixel-for-pixel extract from a 1D C Super35mm crop-mode 1080p image, DSC Labs MegaTrumpet chart.
In crop mode the camera is easily capable of resolution in excess of 750 TVl/ph, reaching perhaps 1080 lines in some directions (you can’t get any better in 1920×1080 HD). Yes, aliasing (mostly chroma moiré) at higher frequencies is a bit stronger, but in real-world shooting I was hard-pressed to get such aliasing to appear; it’s well below the level of the 5D Mk II, and no worse than what I’ve seen on some high-priced single-sensor video cameras. This is the first DSLR I’ve seen that I’d confidently use for HD work without having to worry much about artifacts.
In 4K mode, the image looks like this:
Pixel-for-pixel extract from a 1D C 4K crop-mode 1080p image, DSC Labs MegaTrumpet chart.
This is working at a photosite-per-pixel crop. The best clean resolution we’d typically expect from a Bayer-pattern sensor is about 80% of the maximum line count, or 1728 TVl/ph on a 4096 x 2160 image. When I look at the 4K clips, I see between 1500 and 1730-ish lines; not bad at all. By comparison, I might see a cleaner image out of a 4K RED image—detail extinction right at 1728 TVl/ph and minimal aliasing beyond—but that RED image is deBayered in post using RED’s excellent software, after being captured with a battery-sucking, fan-spinning camera. The 1D C is capturing, deBayering, and compressing this image in real time, yet the camera will run for 90 minutes on a comparatively tiny battery and it’ll barely get warm to the touch despite the complete lack of noisy fans. What’s not to like?
Rolling Shutter
Handy tip: when you have a CMOS camera with multiple frame rates, the highest frame rate in a given mode is a good indicator of that mode’s rolling-shutter timing, since the data have to be read off of the sensor at least as quickly as the minimum frame duration the mode allows. The shorter the rolling-shutter time, the less “jellocam” you’ll see.
To measure rolling shutter, I set up a vertical line (in this case, a light stand in front of a white card) and then panned the camera past it at an even speed with a fast shutter (to reduce blur). I measured the horizontal distance from the position of the top of the light stand between two frames, which is the distance traveled in 1/24 second. I then measured the horizontal difference between the light stand’s position at the top and the bottom of a single frame; that’s the distance the camera traveled during the time it took to scan the image from top to bottom. By comparing the two, I get a reasonably good estimate of the rolling shutter time.
The 1D C’s full-frame modes allow speeds of up to 60fps, so 1/60 sec is the minimum time the sensor can take to read out its data in that mode. I measured the rolling shutter time to be about 1/67 second.
S•35 mode only goes up to 30fps, so we’d expect the rolling shutter to take less than 1/30, but more than 1/60. I came up with about 1/55 sec.
4K? It allows 24fps (and will allow 25fps with a firmware update in April), and I measured the shutter at 1/36 sec from top to bottom.
If jellocam is your main concern, shoot full-frame. But S•35 isn’t a lot worse, and I find S•35’s image quality to be markedly superior.
While 4K is somewhat wobbly by comparison, it’s still in the ballpark of the 5D Mk II at 1080/24p (around 1/39 sec), and we’ve all learned how to deal with that in the past few years.
Sensitivity and Dynamic Range
The camera’s native sensitivity is ISO 400, though you can pick any “normal” ISO from 100 – 51200, plus an “L” setting of 50 (at the expense of a stop of highlight headroom), H1 (102400) and H2 (204800).
In noise terms, it’s hard for me to state how high you can push the ISO rating and get acceptable results, because different people have different noise tolerances. What I will say is that the 1D C at ISO 51200 looks cleaner than my 5D Mk II at ISO 3200; there may be comparable amounts of “grain” in both images, but the 1D C’s image showed less annoying chroma noise and no fixed-pattern noise or vertical striping to speak of.
Fresh out of the box, in Standard or Neutral gammas, the camera shows about 9 stops of dynamic range. Put the camera into Log gamma, and you’ll see 10+ stops with no heroic measures needed. If you use one of the normal gammas and dial back its contrast setting all the way (to -4), you can get closer to the dynamic range of log, although the “normal” gammas all S-curve the highlights and shadows a bit for a natural rolloff. Dialing back the contrast pulls the extremes closer to the midtones; it’s not clear that you’re gaining more than half a stop of absolute latitude, but the lower contrast settings does tend to open the shadows and hold a bit more highlight detail.
I shot the DSC Labs Xyla chart, which has 20 bars, each bar a stop dimmer than its predecessor, and fiddled with ‘em in Final Cut Pro 7. All these images were made at the same exposure setting:
Standard gamma, unmodified. About 9-10 stops.
Log gamma. 10-11 stops visible, as-is.
Standard gamma, contrast -4. Perhaps half a stop more in the highlights, and more open shadows. 10+?
If you take the images into your NLE and play with the black / midtones / white sliders (or lift, gamma, and gain in your color corrector), you can probably eke out another stop or so. The following frame have been processed to pull as much out of the shadows as is (un)reasonably possible, without regard to anything else:
Standard gamma, contrast -4, stretched in post. 11 stops visible, though the shadows are gettin’ rather noisy..
Log gamma, stretched in post. Stretched so far I’m seeing some sort of internal circular reflections (!) (???). But I’m also seeing 12 unclipped bars, with maybe a trace of the 13th... clearly you wouldn’t go this far in real life, but the point is that log lets you go that far.
(In this latter set of images especially, it’s important to remember Art Adams’ distinction between “paycheck stops” and “gravy stops”: paycheck stops are those that you have to get, otherwise your paycheck stops; anything past that is gravy. Based on that, I’m rating the 1D C at 9 paycheck stops in normal gammas, 10 or 10+ in log.)
All of these images were shot with both Auto Lighting Optimizer and Highlight Tone Priority turned off. It’s possible that one or the other of these might have helped level the playing field further; HTP especially offers the possibility of holding another stop in the highlights, moving the normal gammas (where HTP can be used) closer to log gamma (where it can’t be) in total dynamic range.
For a real-world example, here are two images of the same contrasty scene, one in Standard gamma (at default contrast), and one in log:
Standard gamma.
Log gamma.
(Note that while there is a definite difference, it looks even more dramatic than it actually is, because the black level in log gamma is at about 7% brightness whereas it’s at zero in the standard gamma.)
Color
Canon color is pretty color: things just look good. Canon pays special attention to skin tones and the color science is set up to almost always get them where they should be, even if other colors aren’t always dead-on accurate (they’re still almost always attractive, though). Last year, I attended a demo at 32Ten studios (the old Kerner stage) where a C300 was shooting a set illuminated with some truly awful “affordable” fluorescent and LED fixtures. The people on the set looked like zombies, with cold, blue fleshtones (and no, they weren’t trying to look like zombies, that was just the result of the cheap lamps and their dodgy spectra). Yet the C300’s picture on the adjacent monitor showed the people as being, quite literally, in the pink: rich, warm, healthy skintones. Amazing.
To my taste the Standard picture style is a little bit too vivid; I prefer Neutral, with the contrast and sharpness turned down. But tastes vary: here are a series of frame grabs with each of the default picture style setups, to give you an idea of the variations in color and contrast that the camera starts out with:
Etc.
All picture styles include a sharpening adjustment. I find the default to be too edgy for my tastes (but I may be perhaps a little bit too allergic to edge enhancement, compared to most folks), and I normally run with sharpness all the way off or maybe one notch higher than off. The sharpening signal isn’t adjustable other than for overall intensity; it’s a fairly wide, coarse outlining.
As on other Canon DSLRs, you can shoot movies in any exposure mode: program, aperture priority, shutter priority, or full manual control. If you’re in full manual, you’re in control: iris, shutter, and ISO are all at your command. In any other mode, the camera is an auto-exposure camera, and it will vary any parameter that you’re not specifically in charge of in pursuit of its own desired exposure. For example, if you’re in aperture priority mode, you control aperture, but the camera can and will change both shutter speed and ISO as it sees fit. That may be fine for quick ‘n’ dirty ENG, but if you want to retain control of your pictures, full manual is the way to go.
The 1D C will not auto-focus continuously while shooting movies. You can push the AF button if you wish, but the image will brighten and the focus will seek, noisily; it’s not something you want to do while rolling.
Clips are recorded as .mov files in the same folders as the camera’s stills. Media management is drag ‘n’ drop simple; there’s no need for special transfer software. All the clips I recorded Just Worked in FCP 7, FCP X, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and CS6, and DaVinci Resolve.
I only encountered one glitch: on one shoot I used FCP X’s import function to transfer clips from card to computer instead of moving them myself. FCP X, in its questionable wisdom, somehow managed to re-wrap the essence such that the clips played silently in QuickTime Player, though their audio was still present when played inside FCP X. Weird! FCP’s fault, not Canon’s fault, and not fatal… just something to watch out for.
The 1D C uses an EF mount, and so it accepts any EF-mount stills lens as well as Canon EF-mount cine lenses (as well as EF-mount cine lenses from Zeiss and other vendors).
1D C with Canon 24mm cine prime, 30-105mm cine zoom, 24-70mm stills zoom, Sigma 50mm stills prime.
Canon’s cine lenses include electronics so that aperture and focal length are displayed in the 1D C’s readouts, but they are fully manual, with smooth, continuous, long-throw iris, focus, and zoom controls. With cine lenses, smooth and stepless aperture pulls are possible, whereas EOS lenses with electronic controls only allow sudden, 1/3- or 1/2-stop jumps in iris.
(Do bear in mind that while Canon’s cine primes will cover the full frame area, the cine zooms won’t. I tested the 30-105mm T2.8, and while it covered both S•35 and 4K crops without a problem, it vignetted throughout much of its range when shooting full-frame.)
Sometimes cine lenses are called for; other time stills lenses are more appropriate. I used Canon cine primes on a couple of tripod-based gigs, and they worked very well indeed. In these jobs, I used the 1D C as a B camera alongside a C500, with both cameras shooting HD (the 1D C in S•35 mode). S•35 mode on the 1D C is close enough to “real camera” quality (instead of the usual, alias-prone “DSLR quality”) that I didn’t worry about image-rendering mismatches between the cameras. Their colorimetry matched very well, too.
When I spent an afternoon data-wrangling and recording sound for Art Adams as he was shooting 4K on the C500, I wore the 1D C on a strap ‘round my neck—just like a normal tourist camera!—and switched between the 16-35mm and 24-70mm f/2.8 L series stills zooms. That combination let me travel light, and shoot both 5K stills and 4K clips quickly and easily when I wasn’t busy with other duties. We tramped around the woods for about three hours, shooting (and a couple more hours setting up and striking), and the camera was never a burden. Its rounded, melted-in-the-sun contours meant there were no sharp edges or corners to jab into me, and it was even more comfortable to carry around than my 5D with its sharper edges. A single battery lasted the entire time, with plenty of charge left over at the end of the day, and the camera’s low-light performance let me shoot at ISO 1600 and 3200 when the sun sank behind a fog bank, with no noticeable increase in image noise.
Overall, the camera has a very solid feel to it. It compares to the 5D Mk II in much the same way the 5D compares to the Panasonic GH2: bigger, heavier, and more substantial, with a better build quality. It’s not that the 5D or the GH2 are cheap in and of themselves, but the GH2 feels cheap compared to the 5D, and the 5D feels just as cheap compared to the 1D C.
The 1D C comes with a very serious-looking battery charger with space for two batteries. The charger can also drain and recondition batteries.
Conclusion
The Canon 1D C is an amazing piece of work. It’s built atop the 1D X, Canon’s best-ever professional DSLR, and arguably the best DSLR from any manufacturer (whether it tops the Nikon D4 and/or D3X, or vice versa, is a religious debate well beyond the scope of this article). The 1D C adds the best-looking 1080p I’ve seen from a DSLR; true 4K capture, also of very high quality; and Canon’s log gamma in both HD and 4K modes.
The camera offers a clean HDMI 1080p output for offboard recording or monitoring, allows display on the back-panel LCD and HDMI at the same time, and captures motion imagery with 10 or more stops of dynamic range—a superb performance for a DSLR.
It does all this on a single battery, with no huge heatsink, no fans, and without growing appreciably warm (and the battery lasts a decent amount of time, too). It records easy-to-use .mov files on CF cards, at decently high bitrates. It takes EF-mount lenses, with both stills and cine primes and zooms available from both Canon and third-party manufacturers.
But it is a DSLR, with all the operational quirks and compromises that DSLRs have for motion capture: no focus assist while recording; no peaking; no zebras; no built-in ND filters; no eye-level EVF (unless you add a third-party accessory); no reorientable/repositionable LCD; miniplug audio without dedicated audio control knobs. The ergonomics are those of a still camera, not a motion camera.
And it’s $12,000.
Yes, that’s eye-wateringly spendy, but consider that the “mass-market” model it’s built on, the 1D X, is itself $6800 (well, it’s mass-market compared to the 1D C, at any rate). The 1D C’s incremental cost for top-quality 1080p, 4K, and Canon log is “only” $5200; that doesn’t seem quite so bad… even so, that’s $12K for a video camera with DSLR ergonomics. Where might it make sense?
If you’re a stills shooter with one foot in video, there’s a clear case for the 1D C. Not only do you get a class-leading professional DSLR, you get excellent HD from the 1D C’s S•35 crop mode, as well as 4K. If you’re a photojournalist at a newspaper or agency enlightened enough (and rich enough) to have 1D Xs available, and quality video is an important part of your work, I’d argue the S•35 HD from the 1D C is worth the additional cost of the 1D C over the 1D X. For the fashion or sports photographer, the 1D C gives you 24 4K images per second: publication-quality stills at twice the frame rate of even the 1D X’s speedy burst mode, and without the annoyance of the flipping mirror. (This is the one of the use cases that RED has long espoused for their Scarlet and Epic “DSMC”s, but the 1D C has better ergonomics for crossover stills shooters than the RED cameras do.)
If you’re a videographer or cinematographer, the 1D C has the same advantages as other DSLRs, only with better HD than most, no recording time limit to speak of, and 4K to boot. It doesn’t look like a movie camera, so if you need a shot of Natalie Portman on the NYC subway, you can shoot it without attracting a lot of attention (at least until the civilians notice it’s Natalie Portman you’re filming, grin). It’s only three inches front-to-back, so it’s a good choice for constrained spaces like car interiors. Its 4K imaging area is about 20% larger than Super35mm, so any lens you use on it is 20% wider than on an S35-sized sensor, also a useful thing for shooting in tight spaces.
If you need to travel light, and shoot high-quality footage in either HD or 4K, the 1D C runs a long time on minimal power, it records in very dim illumination, and you can sling it on a strap around your neck and go anywhere… and shoot excellent stills with the same camera, too.
Oh, and it makes a fine B camera for a Canon C300 or C500, both rather a bit pricer than the 1D C is. The 1D C shares the same basic colorimetry and “look” as the other Canons; it has Canon log gamma; and it’s the only DSLR I’ve used that I’d happily intercut with a “real” HD camera without worrying about typical DSLR-style artifacts.
So, is Canon mad? Well, sure: a $12,000 DSLR that shoots 4K? That’s just nuts!
Crazy like a fox? Yes indeed: the 1D C does things that no other camera can. Even ignoring 4K capture, the camera combines a best-of-breed professional DSLR with “real camera” HD quality. Add in 4K, and you now have a high-res, compact cine camera that also works as a publication-quality still camera with a 24fps motor drive.
Bottom line: we’re not likely to see 1D Cs flooding the marketplace due to the high price, but there are niches where nothing else can do the job.
I’m sorry I had to send the loaner back!
Disclosures: Canon lent me and Art Adams a 1D C, a C500, three cine primes, and a cine zoom for about a month, and paid shipping and insurance. However Canon did not compensate us for our time or provide other material consideration in return for a favorable review. Canon has reviewed this article for errors of fact, but the opinions in it are mine alone.
About the Author
Adam Wilt is a software developer, engineering consultant, and freelance film & video tech. He’s had small jobs on big productions (PA, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Dir. Robert Wise), big jobs on small productions (DP, “Maelstrom”, Dir. Rob Nilsson), and has worked camera, sound, vfx, and editing gigs on shorts, PSAs, docs, music vids, and indie features. He started his website on the DV format, adamwilt.com/DV.html, about the same time Chris Hurd created the XL1 Watchdog, and participated in DVInfo.net‘s 2006 “Texas Shootout.” He has written for DV Magazine and ProVideoCoalition.com, taught courses at DV Expo, and given presentations at NAB, IBC, and Cine Gear Expo. When he’s not doing contract engineering or working on apps like www.adamwilt.com/cinemeter, he’s probably exploring new cameras, just because cameras are fun.
