nanoFlash with Canon C300?

[Roger Pinto]

Originally Posted by Dan Keaton

Dear Friends,

We had a Canon C300 in a lab for months.

I will check if we still have it, so we can run some tests.

Eager to look at the results. I hope we are enlightened with diff when recorded at all available compression settings & with details rather than an on the fly reporting.

[Paul Cronin]

I have a C300 arriving tomorrow. And look forward at times to use my Nano with the camera. There are times when I shoot in poor light, fast subjects, or will grade a bunch, and the Nano helps me have the bits to solve the problem.

Today we shot a big client in nasty gray light and very gray on gray on water conditions with my EX3. Yes I shot to the cards and also I shot on my Nano knowing it was critical client and I can say at 100 Mb/s 422 long GOP it came out great. Look forward to this when needed on the C300.

Thanks CD

[Charles Papert]

Sounds good!

Well, as it turns out I'm probably going to shift from a Nanoflash to a Gemini soon, so if anyone is in the market for the former, let me know!

[Stephen McCarthy]

Hey Charles! Greetings from Boston,

I just checked back to this forum and was surprised to be reminded that I'd started this thread all those months ago. I've now had my C300 out for about 45 days of shooting since taking delivery back on "Leap Day" at the end of Feb. Much of that work has had the C300 paired with the nanoFlash tucked neatly into the rear of a Redrock Ultracage Blue just forward of an Anton-Bauer battery plate. I find that the nanoFlash gives me the redundancy that you describe and it also performs what I've found to be another useful function for some of my archive-heavy, long-form PBS projects. Most of these are shooting 24P but because there's so much NTSC archive material they're often staying in a 59.94 editing timeline. Recording the SDI out of the 300 WITHOUT 3:2 pull-down removal gives us a version of the camera original with 24 "over" 60P (actually 23.98-over-59.94) which is not an option with the camera's progressive-only recorder. The .mxf files from both recorders seem to get along very nicely with one another in Avid. The nanoFlash is the only reliable, stand-alone recorder I've found thus far which fits into this rig which, with the addition of a Zacuto handgrip re-locator on the front rods, has pretty much the profile of an Arri SR or my beloved Aaton XTR. I just finished the initial shoot of an on-going project where we paired the C300 with a NEX-FS700 feeding high speed footage to a Gemini and I'm getting raves back from the cutting room in London although I don't think they were quite prepared for the sheer volume of the Gemini files. Thankfully the on-board AVCHD recorder on the 700 makes for a less intimidating off-line proxy for those. Hope you are well. I catch your work often.

best,

Stephen McCarthy

[Dan Keaton]

I checked with Andy, our Lab Manager.

He did run tests on the C300 with the nanoFlash.

He is searching for those files now.

We no longer have a C300 in our lab, but we do have a C500, which we can run in the C300 mode, which should yield the same results.

As soon as we have the files, we will post them for you.

[Mark Trottenberg]

I just finished a job where we shot with the Canon C300 recording internally and also recorded externally to the nanoflash set at 100mbs MXF. The editor claimed that when he examined the nanoflash footage on the Vvid it identified it as still shot at 50mbs, and he couldn't perceive any difference between it and the footage shot on the camera. Any idea what is going on here?

MT

[Dan Keaton]

Dear Mark,

If you set the nanoFlash to record at 100 Mbps (100 Megabits per second), then you will actually get 100 Mbps.

But, we will identify in the file header that it is 50 Mbps.

We do this so that the Non-Linear Editors, such as Sony Vegas, Final Cut Pro, Adobe and others will recognize our footage as Sony XDCam 4:2:2 footage.

The NLE will use all 100 Mbps.

50 Mbps footage can be good.

But, for some shots the difference between 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps can be obvious.

100 Mbps gives the codec the luxury of handing motion in the scene, motion in the camera, and lots of detail in the scene without problems.

A quick comparison between 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps, depending on the footage my not reveal any differences.

I hope this helps.

[John Richard]

"The NLE will use all 100 Mbps"

Thanks Dan for that answer. I have been wondering about this for some time. I could see the difference in fast moving footage and detailed footage such as blowing grasses and leaves as well as welding sparks and metalizing spray. But the footage was always labeled at 50 even though I know we shot at 100.

Your answer confirmed what I was thinking. It also confirmed that I should not just shoot in 50 data rate because the NLE (CS6) "just downconverts from the 100 data rate anyway". Good to hear that the NLE IS actually using the data rate set on the nanoFlash and flashXDR (remember those babies ; >}

[Jack Zhang]

The real difference comes when grading 100 vs 50. Simply due to the fact that there's more data, you can push the grade further with 100 than with 50.

[Mark Trottenberg]

Dan
I'm still having trouble.conving my editor that the c300 outputs more than 50 Mbps. Are you going to post the results of your. C300 tests ?

[Dave Sperling]

Hi Mark,
Tell your editor that the C300 outputs an uncompressed 8 bit signal through its HD-SDI connector. You could record it full uncompressed on a Gemini, but then you'd be using 1TB of data every 84 minutes or so...
Internally (downstream from the HD-SDI output) the camera compresses at 50Mbps. That's about 1000 minutes per TB of data (so you could say roughly a 12:1 compression ratio compared to the uncompressed?) With the Nanoflash you can record from the uncompressed HD-SDI data at a lower compression ratio than internally in the camera, thereby eliminating some possible artifacts.

[Dan Keaton]

Dear Mark,

I spoke again with our Lab Manager, who stays very busy, requesting that we post some of our C300 files.

We no longer have a C300 in our lab, but he feels that we can find some good footage that we recorded from the C300.

I hope this will not take much longer.

[Stephen McCarthy]

Hi All. And still, the discussion continues. Flattered to have such esteemed consumers of gear participating. With all of the talk about ergonomics of cabling nanoFlash to C300 I thought you might be interested to see the design that I've evolved for my camera over the past year. Just a quickie photo on the go but the layout's been serving me well.

cheers,

Stephen McCarthy

[Roger Pinto]

The question of quality difference between C300 internal 50mbps vs nanoFLASH 180mbps still remains unanswered. Shouldn't users of c300+nanoflash simply shoot at 180mbps to get visually noticable difference.

Also I have no idea that C300 hdsdi outputs uncompressed data ! Pl confirm as I just read it on the above replies.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Roger Pinto

The question of quality difference between C300 internal 50mbps vs nanoFLASH 180mbps still remains unanswered. Shouldn't users of c300+nanoflash simply shoot at 180mbps to get visually noticable difference.

You probably won't notice a difference.

[QUOT]Also I have no idea that C300 hdsdi outputs uncompressed data ! Pl confirm as I just read it on the above replies.[/QUOTE]

Of course it puts out uncompressed data. However, don't confuse "uncompressed" with "raw" because they are two entirely different things.