C100 Mark II with Ninja

[Wil Vermeesch]

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

[Andrew Maslen]

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

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Wil Vermeesch

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

[Dan Brockett]

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.

[Wil Vermeesch]

Thank you all for this feedback!

[Pavel Sedlak]

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.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Pavel Sedlak

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.

[Lico Francisco]

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.

[Markus Nord]

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".

[Wil Vermeesch]

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

THX

[Miklos Nemeth]

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

[Dan Brockett]

Originally Posted by Lico Francisco

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.

[Dan Brockett]

Originally Posted by Gary Huff

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

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.

[Markus Nord]

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...

[Michael Galvan]

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.