Canon C100 Mark II -- Worth the upgrade?

[Pavel Sedlak]

Originally Posted by Kyle Hawthorne

I'm curious if you have any examples of slow-motion taken with the C100 Mark I in 50i converted to 25p?

Does the Ninja Star help clean up the conversion?

NinjaStar helps generally with quality of footages (it is more visible with moving or at lowlight), and the best quality of footages is also base for the best conversion result in Avid MediaComposer with its fluid timewarp effect. Yes, both qualities are visible at this way of slow-motion, but I mean the first part generally, not only for slow-motion.

Is it more clear?

[Noa Put]

That's why asking how smooth it is to work with single tracks of 4K or simply playing back is something of a mistake. I want to know what it performs like with a LUT and Curves effect at the minimum (both Beauty Box and Colorista II are resource hogs, but there's supposed to be a Beauty Box Realtime pluging coming out I will be taking a look at) and definitely what kind of render speed you look at. At the end of the day, the render speed is a huge deal to me.

Neither a YUV curve and a color correction combined has any impact on realtime performance on a native 4K gh4 clip in a 1080p project and I"m using a it 3770 cpu on a pc that only has 8gb of memory. I don't use any other external colorcorrection plugins as they are often not really optimized for edius. Memory usage never gets above 4gb.
Render speeds on those colorcorrected clips are almost twice realtime to either hq avi or a h.264 codec.

[Gary Huff]

That's great, but I am not about to switch to Edius. FCPX and Premiere performance on a maxed out MacBook Pro leaves a bit to be desired, but then I use heavier effects as well.

[Les Wilson]

Originally Posted by Nate Haustein

...the WiFi is workable but the application/website itself is pretty poor - Canon needs to put out a true "App" as soon as possible. ....

Does the App let you STOP recording or only START it like Panasonic's GH3?

[Nate Haustein]

Yes, you can stop the recording with the "app."

[Pavel Sedlak]

Originally Posted by Kyle Hawthorne

I'm curious if you have any examples of slow-motion taken with the C100 Mark I in 50i converted to 25p?

one year ago:

Canon EOS C100 - some interesting types of footages (2013) on Vimeo

at 2:15 is sample of the 50i to 25p slow-motion (but with internal recording, you can see AVCHD compresion artifacts).

I hope this helps.

EDIT:

Here is a big test of Noise Reduction, internal vs. external recording, 25p vs 25i at lowlight.

C100 and Ninja2 in camera noise reduction test (cine1, wdr, canon-log gamma, 25p and 25i) on Vimeo

The best parts are at:
ISO1600 25p (10:20),
ISO2000 25i + deinterlace (15:56),
ISO4000 25p (18:58) - the best part of all.

I was working at Avid MediaComposer with these versions of clips (in this order):
1. AVCHD in XDCAM long GOP HQ 35Mbps 420 codec (usual quality)
2. AVCHD in Avid DNxHD185 (422, 8bit. I-Frame only) codec (better quality)
3. Ninja2 version in Avid DNxHD185 (true 422, 8bit, I-Frame only) codec (the best quality)
4. repeat "1." for better visual contrast with "3."

The best results from ISO4000 25p are here:
Look at these three pictures from NINJA2 at a full quality (NR0, NR2, NR4):
videoproduce.cz/images/006b_NINJA2_NR0_at_21min_30sec_origQT.tif
videoproduce.cz/images/007b_NINJA2_NR2_at_22min_07sec_origQT.tif - the winner
videoproduce.cz/images/008b_NINJA2_NR4_at_22min_40sec_origQT.tif

[Michael Silverman]

I've owned a C100 Mk I for about 1.5 years and was almost certain that I would be buying the C100 Mk II as a replacement for my 70D. However, once they dropped the price of the C100 Mk I to $4500 with Dual Pixel AF, I was very tempted to just get another one instead of the Mk II. I spent a few weeks thinking about it and I decided to save the $1K and buy another C100 Mk I.

My reasons are that the Mk I has been the best camera I've ever owned, it's been extremely reliable, and I've figured out ways to work around all of it's weaknesses. The Mk II looks amazing and I'm sure I would have been completely happy with it, but I just don't think the extra $1000 will come back to me by my clients seeing a difference between the two. I think the only thing that would potentially make me more money is the option for slow motion as it can be very helpful for wedding videos. In the end, I feel like the C100 Mk I has been everything I hoped for and more so why not save $1K and go with something that has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for the past year and half.

[Steven Ansell]

The decision to buy better equipment should not be driven only by things such as it not having an effect on the product the client receives. The impact of the upgrades on how much easier it makes things for you to do your job should also be a major criteria.

[Michael Silverman]

Originally Posted by Steven Ansell

The decision to buy better equipment should not be driven only by things such as it not having an impact on the product the client receives. The impact on the upgrades on how much easier it makes things for you to do your job should also be a major criteria.

That's definitely true, but in my case I've been perfectly happy with the C100 Mk I. I think if someone has been unhappy with lots of the C100 Mk I features and the Mk II will make there job a lot easier then it's certainly worth considering the jump.

[Kyle Hawthorne]

I've noticed used C100 Mark I prices continue to drop as more Mark II's ship.

I watched a used C100 Mark I with extra battery and two 64gb SDHC cards sell on ebay last week for $2,800!!!

I expect these prices to continue dropping as more Mark II's hit the market, which will make my decision even harder.