Hi,
Investigating to buy a Canon C100 mark II but I noticed a lot of shops and people mention to combine with a Ninja blade because of a necessary quality upgrade??

I know the boost you can give with the Ninja but to be honest for the run and gun which I want to use this camera (wildlife), I doubt if this combi is really necessary. I don't use this camera for broadcasting items.

Can somebody give me his/her experiences and why you choose for with or without the Ninja?

Thank you all in advance
Wil

Hi Wil,

I have Ninja Blade but rarely use it as it adds quite a bit of bulk to the camera, I mainly shoot events and want as small a profile as possible. I know the quality is better, but in all honesty I can't tell the difference, but I don't shoot green screen etc.
Sometimes if I have to turn a event round really quickly it can be handy to record in Pro res and then use the drive as my editing drive.
But most of the time the AVCHD from internal recording is just fine !

Andrew

Can somebody give me his/her experiences and why you choose for with or without the Ninja?

I use a Ninja (Shogun now) because:

a) Clients still on FCP7 love the ProRes right off the drive.

b) More robust when it comes to actual color correction like power windows, secondaries, and keying.

If all you're looking for is an immediate and striking visual difference, it looks more or less the same as the internal AVCHD.

AVCHD vs ProRes

Agree with Gary, I have the Blade. I mainly bought it for the exact reason he outlines, two of my clients are still on FCP 7 and they love me handing them ProRes HQ files right after the shoot, no conversions, saves them considerable time and money. We also shoot a lot of green screen interviews, Blade is worth it for those two.

But when I was in South Africa and had to run all over Cape Town in a day to gather B-roll, I skipped the Blade for the reasons outlined, too clunky, extra cables and batteries to deal with. The converted AVCHD footage looks great. High motion, high detail scenes and green screen is where the Blade is better but other than those, AVCHD on this camera looks pretty good. It is nice when shooting the Blade though, I had an SSD take a dump on me after shooting hours of interviews, luckily I was dual recording on the C100's internal cards so my rear was saved.

Thank you all for this feedback!

Try Ninja Star, it is a very small recorder (only ProRes HQ codec), you will see improving level of details, less compression artifacts, robust quality for color correction and denoise. It's only works for HD 25/29.97fps.

Try Ninja Star, it is a very small recorder (only ProRes HQ codec)

No, it records LT, 422, and HQ.

you will see improving level of details

No you won't. It can eliminate macroblocking in certain visuals, depending on the complexity of the scene, but most of these require zooming in at 200% or more to see. You will not see any difference for the most part between internal and recording HQ on the Ninja Star.

It's only works for HD 25/29.97fps.

No, it will record 24p and 60p in 720 as well.

Hi Dan Brockett,

When you say converted. Do you convert the AVCHD into ProRes? What software do you use to convert it into ProRes or do you let FCPX do the conversion.

Today I'll resive a C100 and a Ninja Star. I got a few green screen productions this last year and I needed an upgrade from my 5D3. I also do wildlife and I'll se how I can mouth the Star one the C100 in a way that it's not in the way. I need the hot shoe to be free for my mic, so I need to find a nother spot to make it "disappear".

Hello Markus,
when you have mounted this on your C100, please post a picture of it.

THX

I had exactly the same dilemma recently and I went for the Ninja 2 because of the SSD/HD recording media.The problem with Ninja Star is that it works with the (hell) expensive CFast cards. I prefer my SSD/HD disks. I bought my Ninja2 off ebay.de and it's brilliant. I use it with a much smaller camera than yours, though. Since my camera has no built-in XLR, I keep a Tascam DR-60D on my rig on a number of situation when I want to record audio directly together with the video. Next year when and if I upgraded to 4K, I could go for the Shogun and I could use my SSDs, too.
Miki

Hi Dan Brockett,

When you say converted. Do you convert the AVCHD into ProRes? What software do you use to convert it into ProRes or do you let FCPX do the conversion.

Hi Lico:

Yes, I convert the AVCHD to Pro Res 422 HQ using 5DtoRGB Batch but any conversion utility can do it. I ran tests a few years ago and 5DtoRGB is the best quality conversion and the slowest. MPEG Streamclip and some of the others are faster, but there are gamma shifts and the colors look different.

I use a Ninja (Shogun now) because:

a) Clients still on FCP7 love the ProRes right off the drive.

b) More robust when it comes to actual color correction like power windows, secondaries, and keying.

If all you're looking for is an immediate and striking visual difference, it looks more or less the same as the internal AVCHD.

AVCHD vs ProRes (https://vimeo.com/54325017)

Great test footage Gary, nice variety of subjects. You really can't see any difference between the two. I use the Blade just for convenience of files and for green screen. If I was on FCPX or Premiere Pro and could natively handle AVCHD and didn't have my two clients, I wouldn't have bought the Blade. But my clients love it.

The CFast1.0 is expensive, but the Ninja Star+1 CFast card is still cheaper then the Ninja Blade. But you don't get a screen. But that's the reason why I did get the Star, cause I already got a screen and wanted a small recorder that would not bring any extra bulk but still give me the better codec when I hit the woods...

I use a Nanoflash with my C100 Mark II. I have it attached to the threaded mount on the handle.

Ultimately for the nest image quality out of the camera, you'll want to use an external recorder. But as mentioned, the main reason to use these external recorders is to provide more flexibility in post-production. At first look, you'll hardly notice a quality difference between internal recording and high bit-rate external recording.

You will in certain instances that will challenge low bit-rate Long-GOP. I have noticed cleaner, sharper footage from external recording when shooting complex scenes, like water splashing, for example.

I use a Ninja (Shogun now) because:

a) Clients still on FCP7 love the ProRes right off the drive.

b) More robust when it comes to actual color correction like power windows, secondaries, and keying.

If all you're looking for is an immediate and striking visual difference, it looks more or less the same as the internal AVCHD.

AVCHD vs ProRes (https://vimeo.com/54325017)

Thanks for this Gary,

The ninja can be a clunky thing to drag around and lots of times I'd rather just shoot internally. Though I haven't figured out how to get FCPX to split the AVCHD clips - and Clipwrap makes huge Prores files.

I noticed that the Ninja does not like the high ISO's in your test footage. I have heard that the Ninja does best at 850, and haven't pushed it beyond that.

I like the idea of the Ninja Star and the size is much better for on-camera mounting, but the price of the CFast cards is still too high for me. At a minimum I need 256GB to record a classical concert including the before and after talks. Guess I'll stick with the Ninja 2 and an SSD (or even a 2.5 HDD) for a while yet. I have a 480GB SSD that didn't work in the BMCC so I repurposed it for the Ninja 2.

(I know the Atomos branded card is more reasonably priced, but two 128GB cards won't always work out so I'd need three of them)

The new Black Magic Video assist that was announced at Nab today looks interesting. Although I don't shoot much green screen, it has me thinking about it for my C100.

No you won't. It can eliminate macroblocking in certain visuals, depending on the complexity of the scene, but most of these require zooming in at 200% or more to see. You will not see any difference for the most part between internal and recording HQ on the Ninja Star.

Well I agree with Pavel. It's especially obvious in flesh tones indoors. By eliminating macro blocking there is more detail. I don't find it necessary to zoom in beyond 100% to see in most cases, and with a little colour correction the difference is especially obvious.

Hi there. I hope this thread is alive and well! I decided to buy a used Ninja 2 from a friend to use with the C100 mk2. I have been recording on MP4 1080 60p with the C100 mk2 and I know the ninja 2 can only do 1080 30p so I guess I must change the C100 mk2 to 1080 30p as well? I intend to record internally too in MP4. What happens if I don't change the internal settings on the C100 mk2?
thanks for the help

Erick

What happens if I don't change the internal settings on the C100 mk2

Hey Erick, trying hooking up your Ninja-2 to the C100 Mark II and setting it to 1080p60 and see what happens!

hi. I just updated the ninja to v4.23 and tried recording. I left the Canon C100 MK2 at 108060p...
but on the ninja my options were 1080i59.94, 1080p 29.97 and 1080p 23.98 so since I don't want interlaced or 24p I changed the input on the ninja to 1080p 29.97...it records and it looks fine...is this the correct thing to do?
thanks
Erick

Hi Gary. I just imported a couple of clips from the Ninja2 into FCP7- Prores LT and if I changed the timeline to match the clip, to my eyes the clip looks interlaced -some jagged edges etc even if the clip info shows me that in fact is a prores LT 1080p 29.97..I'm sure I read about this somewhere here before..but if I import another prores LT video and I change the timeline to match it and then import the same file from the ninja2, the clip doesn't seem to have any jagged edges and it looks crisper..ah...

no clue! but I'll keep reading
thanks
E

Hi Gary. I just imported a couple of clips from the Ninja2 into FCP7- Prores LT and if I changed the timeline to match the clip, to my eyes the clip looks interlaced -some jagged edges etc even if the clip info shows me that in fact is a prores LT 1080p 29.97.

Yes, that's what is output from the C100 Mark II in 60p to the Ninja unless you activate the 59.97P option in the HDMI menu. If you do that, however, you will not get an input signal into the Ninja because it does not support 1080p60.

hi again Gary. I know the shogun is the only Atomos recorded capable of 108060p but I will use the ninja2 maybe 15% of the time- the MP4 coded is good for most of my work.
But I want to set up the Ninja2 correctly for those times I will use it.
So would it be better to change the C100 settings from MP4 -59.94p at 35Mbps to MP4-29.97p at 24Mbps?
Seems like a big drop from 35Mbps to 24Mbps...I would like to maximize the pic quality.
but even without changing the C100 settings I was able to record into the ninja at 29.97... I seldomly videotape at 24p.

any suggestions? thanks
Erick

So would it be better to change the C100 settings from MP4 -59.94p at 35Mbps to MP4-29.97p at 24Mbps?

I have no idea what you are asking Erick. Do you want to record your footage at 60p or 30p?

well..what I'm thinking is that I could record internally to 60p MP4 (in case I wanted to do some slow mo later by making this footage conform to 24p) and I could record to the ninja 2 as 29.97p which is the max the ninja2 can do...I hope this doesn't cause any problems with the prores LT footage.
Maybe the best thing to do will be to set up the C100mk2 to record 1080 30p at 24Mbps so that it matches the ninja2. I seldomly do slow mo anyway.

I saw this video on youtube and in the description (I clicked on more to see the English details), they recorded to 30p in the ninja 2 and internally to 60p without any issues it seems..

Canon EOS C100 Mark2 + ATOMS Ninja2 Test - YouTube

I will do some testing and decide. I will not use AVCHD. Only MP4.
thanks
E