best settings C100

[Andrew Maclaurin]

I bought a Canon C100 this week and have been doing a few tests before my first wedding of the season.
I have a question to those that have used the camera, what custom picture settings do you use and how do expose correctly?
I'm considering using WDR custom picture but I want to check if it's a good choice for a wedding.

[Nicholas de Kock]

Andrew Wide-DR is perfect for weddings, pretty much everything, in fact it looks so good you barely have to do any grading. I've been using it for months now. Play around with the settings, you can reset a profile back to it's original state via reset so don't be afraid to play.

Johan en Marné on Vimeo

[John Knight]

Why were the brides shoes hanging in the chandelier?

[Adrian Tan]

John pretty much always cracks me up.

[Nicholas de Kock]

Haha Adrian, as opposed to your pre-wedding videos? lol :P If the bride wants the shoes on the chandelier then she gets them on the chandelier she's my client after all. I'd appreciate some constructive feedback this is what our community is all about.

[Andrew Maclaurin]

cheers nicolas.
What's the maximum iso you use?

[Adrian Tan]

Hey Nick, post that vid again in the samples section and I'll give some proper feedback! By the way, I've got nothing against shoes in the chandelier shots, and I respect the pain-in-the-butt effort that would go into such a shot -- getting a slider that high etc.

Andrew, I don't have a C100 so shouldn't even be commenting, but, for what it's worth, one thing Abraham Joffe said recently about using the 1DC, and he also mentioned this in his blog on shooting a 4K wedding in Greece, is that when he shot C-Log he could never get the image quite as saturated as he wanted in post.

[Nicholas de Kock]

I can concur what Adrian says about C-Log, it's very hard to get the image to look good unless you are a pro colourist. I used C-Log in the beginning but simple things like setting the White Balance correctly becomes a nightmare with C-Log, I would literally look at the image & not know if my WB was correct with all my years of experience. Wide-DR works & looks good.

Andrew it's hard to choose a maximum ISO level as long as you are not under-exposed you can go really high with the ISO. I will comfortably go to 5000-8000 ISO for official things like speeches, etc. On the dance floor for fun shots I turn off all my lights and go 12 000 - 16 000 ISO if I have to. You can get away with high ISO if there isn't too much black in your shot or when exposed properly. In case of emergency lower your shutter speed to 1/25 (for us in PAL land) this also adds a few stops of light to slow moving subjects like a stationary speech.

Other setting worth mentioning is run ABB (Automatic Black Balance) before every shoot, put the body cap on the camera so no light gets on sensor and run ABB, this will clean up your noise. I customised my Wide-DR by increasing sharpness to about +4 with noise reduction set to 3. I also do a slight white balance shift of about 4M when working with florescent/led lighting.

[Dave Partington]

I agree that CineLog can be hard to work with, but it's doable if you have the time and you can be rewarded by amazing dynamic range when needed. Some shots are worth it, other shots it's easier to just use Wide DR or shoot with the regular settings until you get comfortable.

I do ABB quite often on corporate shoots. Every time I set up a new scene that requires different ISO settings I'll ABB and this helps keep the noise down (or visually non existent) up to reasonably high ISO.

Where I do struggle is on run and gun situations where I don't get change to ABB as often. When using CineLog (inc Wide DR) the noise can creep in if you have to push the mid tones too much, so be very careful with exposure. I'm still experiments and probably will be for several more weeks - subject the rain stopping and the wind dying down! Arrgghh!!

I've also noticed that if you use a Ninja 2 to capture ProRes HQ you could see more noise than is coming from the internal codec. This is because H264 is effectively de-noising a little to achieve it's compression targets, so while ProRes is nice for editing, you may end up doing a little more de-noising than with the internal codec. If I didn't have a couple of people that insisted on real 4:2:2 instead of 4:2:0 I'd probably stick with the internal codec ;)

When shooting indoors, if there's not really that much dynamic range required, the standard settings for the C100 work perfectly well and IMO give a slightly more accurate colour representation too. I've noticed the CineLog can skew the white balance and I'd ended up adding some green & red in the camera profiles to get better colours straight out of camera in tungsten lighting, though unfortunately this can vary based on the kind of indoor lighting you are under.