Canon News

Much has been written these days about Canon’s latest (and perhaps unfortunate) news, so it is not my intention to repeat this information already given but only to try to summarize certain facts.

The first novelty in the DSLR world to be presented a few weeks ago was the Canon 1DX (although it has not yet gone on sale), a slightly evolved version (in video features) of the famous 5D. Here you have a link to an article in Spanish from Panorama Audiovisual magazine where you can see the new features. Full frame sensor (photo), multiframe rate and resolution (25, 24, 29.97, 50…in 1080, 720 and SD), possibility of TC (rec run and free run) but apparently without gen lock that allows shooting stereoscopy, recording up to 29 minutes on CF cards making several media files per clip and apparently the option of two types of compression (intraframe and interframe thinking in post-production, but both in principle H264) are some of the main features.

In addition Canon has announced a decrease in noise and color artifacts thanks to the dual Digic 5+ processor and an improvement in the layout of the controls for video shooting. But we will have to wait for the tests to see these results.

After this, on November 3rd (coinciding with Avid ‘s presentation and BEFORE Red’s) Canon presented its new Cinema Eos family of cameras and lenses, with which it intended to make a triumphant entry into the world of digital cinematography. Basically the Eos C300 (first camera of the family) is a hormone eos that allows to place Canon EF lenses (both the usual Canon white ones and new ones with cinema design) or PL cinema lenses (with optional mount on the eos C300PL model), of course CMOS S35mm 16:9 of 8.3 Mp and logarithmic gamma curve (with iso 850) of 12 nominal fstops (that is what Canon says).

The problems are two: the first one is the recording codec (XFCodec). Unfortunately if it is a digital cinematography camera the 50Mb/s 422 8b Mpeg2 of the codec is not enough (and it doesn’t have a raw option either). And the second one is the price, in this respect I invite you to read the article in Pol Turrents’ blog that describes the Canon C300-Red Scarlet battle.

For more information, if you want you can download the pdf of the Canon Cinema series that my dear friend Estrella Oñate has passed on to me.

Just to add that (unless there are new developments in the structure of the recording folders of the cameras) both for the d1x and the c300 will continue using the same ingest tools as for previous versions (AMA in Avid and log and transfer in FCP7) since the QT structures in H264 of the d1x and MXF in XFcodec of the C300 are maintained. When the cameras can be tested we will try to make a more detailed analysis of camera and postproduction.