More footage from japan arrived this morning. This edit shows various 120fps (2k crop mode) shot in Clog2.

Canon C300 MKII 120 FPS Slow Motion Test on Vimeo

Good news is there's no aliasing or obvious compression artifacts showing up in the generally complex shots he's done (cheers to canon for building a nice scalable codec with higher data rates for 120p) but I'm curious why the shots generally look soft, and are mostly lacking in detail. (maybe I've been looking at too much 4k off this camera). Also I have to say than I'm getting a little miffed a folks demo-ing Clog2 on heavily overcast days. Not sure if that's what's affecting the sharpness and generally soggy grade on this film or not....Sure...we all want to see what it looks like, but anyone using a 15 stop gamma on days like that, is missing the point. So far the best example of the new cLog2 I've seen came last week with the variety of fearlessly high contrast shots in this spot Brett Danton shot for Canon Australia:

B R E T T D A N T O N - D I R E C T O R - P H O T O G R A P H E R | 0 | 1 (http://www.brettdanton.tv/LATEST/1/thumbs)

re. the softness - I heard in the Zacuto review of the camera a Canon guy quietly mention that it can only do slow mo in 720P... !

If thats true, then thats why it aint too sharp.

Which is a great shame... (understatement)

But if this is the case, why isn't everyone talking about it?

re. the softness - I heard in the Zacuto review of the camera a Canon guy quietly mention that it can only do slow mo in 720P... !

I think he misspoke.

re. the softness - I heard in the Zacuto review of the camera a Canon guy quietly mention that it can only do slow mo in 720P... !



I guess he was talking about C300 Mark I and not the Mark II.

Well...this footage certainly looks a little like 720p in terms of resolution.

He's allowed for download of the prores version of the edit, and it is marginally more detailed. I think it still looks pretty soft, but I'm going to play with in in fcp and see how it handles a little sharpening. I don't have much experience with HFR footage from other cameras, but I'm always hearing about various image quality issues. I'm curious how this compares.

The C300 MkII can only do 120fps @ 720p.

We had one in the studio yesterday. This is due to the need to crop the sensor for high speed,
which is why RED with its huge sensor can do higher frame rates.

The C300 MkII can only do 120fps @ 720p.

I have seen the C300 Mark II in studio as well, and it has no option for 720p 120 unless they have changed it since last month. It has always shown 120 at 1080 and 2K resolution 10-bit 422 only.

Hmm, both the Zacuto video (with Larry Thorpe) and our Rep said the C300II high speed 'flavor' was 120fps at 1280x720. We didn't try it or even look for it - so i can't say with certainty.

Yeah...no. :-)

from canon's feature list --

Slow- and Fast-Motion Recording (Up to 120 fps)
The EOS C300 Mark II Digital Cinema Camera features shooting speeds ranging from 1 fps (for time-lapse filming) to its highest speed of 120 fps (in 2K/Full HD). A wide range of expressive effects are made possible for creative digital filmmaking.

They've always presented it as most likely (but not confirmed as) being a 50% crop of the sensor -- essentially a direct pixel readout versus the the 1080p60 which is taken from the full sensor and resampled. We did a visual confirmation of it at a store visit, again the rep saying it wasn't confirmed (this was in June).

it looks like we have an answer in the white paper that Canon published today. 120fps is taking a 14bit 4 frame (RGGB), 1k (540P) sample, processing it and then up sampling it to 2k.

So the good news is that the image has consistent color, image correction, and white balance performance in 120 fps compared to other frame rates, at the (bad news) expense of the lower resolution we've all noticed.

https://usa.canon.com/CUSA/assets/app/pdf/camera/brochures/WhitePaper-imageperformanceenhancements-eosc300markii.pdf

So the good news is that the image has consistent color, image correction, and white balance performance in 120 fps compared to other frame rates, at the (bad news) expense of the lower resolution we've all noticed.

That resolution loss makes it look really poor. If 120fps can look good, we need to see some nice examples pronto.

Coupled with the 120fps crop factor this is disappointing.

Someone who's an engineer in these matters might want to chime in. When we look at the 4k path on this camera, it refers to a 4 frame 1080p sample that is reassembled into a 4k ouput. And we know that this is a 4k sensor, but canon has always had a novel way of reading the c-series sensor, and my guess is this strategy probably gives us something similar in 4k to what a standard RGB debayer of a sensor of this resolution would give -- approx 75% of the actual resolution of the sensor. Anyway...given the 4k processing path...it only makes sense that the 120fps cropped sensor path would involve a 1k/540p sample...and if so...we are probably looking at something like 720p for actual resolution.

it only makes sense that the 120fps cropped sensor path would involve a 1k/540p sample...and if so...we are probably looking at something like 720p for actual resolution.

Actually, re-reading it seems to indicate that the image is made up of 4 540p chunks? That might make the resolution look better.

This was Philip Bloom's test with some 100fps footage (because of the 25p base) mixed with normal framerate material (in 4K no less):

4K: The Palace, The Square & The Circus

For comparison, here is the Sony FS7 from his material for The Wonder List.

Yakel Village, Tanna, Vanuatu

I find the moire on that first slow-mo shot of the child to be quite appalling.

Yeah...I don't really see anything wrong with PB's C300II footage...I think we're seeing something very close to 1080p there and so there's nothing to worry about. The occasional aliasing in the Fs7 is possibly him sharpening things up a bit.

Hopefully the Armadas piece is just an anomaly...maybe he's got a problem on ingest....who knows...but it seems that the PB shots put the "problem" to rest. ( FWIW, I think also there are a couple of 120fps shots in Trick Shot, and neither of them seems to show the softness of Armadas video).