How can Canon manage not to put a fan in C300 while we have a noisy fan in scarlet?

[Togan Gokbakar]

I truly love my scarlet,but annoyed with couple of design flows. Such as the noisy fan and the cmos being in a tunnel which makes wide leica lenses impossible to use. Today I attended a C300 presentation. I don't like the c300. Why on earth someone pay 15-20 thousand for a 4:2:2 8 bit camera. But I appreciated one thing.I realised that there is no fan in it.( maybe a silent one I dunno) How can canon manage not to put a fan in a camera where probably using more processing power to turn the raw data to a XF codec? I wish a silent scarlet in future. What do you think?

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

What?

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/new-canon-cinema-eos-c300-c300-pl-cameras/505440-my-c300-quite-loud.html


Do you realize how much heat and energy it takes to cool the Scarlet processor?


Have you tried adjusting the fan speed in the controls section of the menu?

 

[Arnold F.]

My girlfriend was apprehensive about my buying a $15K camera but loves it now since her hairdryer broke.

Yesterday I had an actress, while still in character as a junkie, freak out about the fan when it came on in the middle of a take. I subsequently raised the in-record running speed and it was, thereafter, both efficient enough for long takes and quiet.

I'm not crazy about the fan noise, either, but will learn to live with it. That it can be lowered enough for shooting is obviously the most important thing.

 

[Alan Skinner]

I truly love my scarlet,but annoyed with couple of design flows. Such as the noisy fan and the cmos being in a tunnel which makes wide leica lenses impossible to use. Today I attended a C300 presentation. I don't like the c300. Why on earth someone pay 15-20 thousand for a 4:2:2 8 bit camera. But I appreciated one thing.I realised that there is no fan in it.( maybe a silent one I dunno) How can canon manage not to put a fan in a camera where probably using more processing power to turn the raw data to a XF codec? I wish a silent scarlet in future. What do you think?

Bit much to call it a design flaw. A design flaw would be a camera with a fan that didn't work. Not a camera that is known to have a fan that does work.

Maybe just semantics but an important difference when you are going to start with the thread title you did and then use that type of description.

 

[Togan Gokbakar]

Bit much to call it a design flaw. A design flaw would be a camera with a fan that didn't work. Not a camera that is known to have a fan that does work.

We can call it 'imperfection' instead of flow. (Cmos in a tunnel is definitely a flow by the way.) But in 2012 having a camera with a airplane engine on it is a bit disturbing. Don't get me wrong. I love my scarlet. using it all the time. But I want to see better from red. Maybe some other cooling methods can be an option in the future. I know chips get hot . Intel is trying to make cooler processor all the time. Maybe liquid cooling or multi core processing(8 cores running on lower speeds which runs cooler) can be an option. But i am sure that noisy fan is not the future.

 

[J Taylor]

The answer is simple, the processing power it takes to record 4K is much greater than 1080p. The more a processor works the hotter it gets, processors get very hot. The fan is necessary on the RED cameras because the processor is more powerful on RED cameras because the image is 4 times the size on RED cameras.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

There is a fan in the C300 it's just quiet. I had a pre-production model that had a fan was almost as loud as my Red Ones'. The production model of the C300 that I bought has a fan that is so quiet it's almost silent (literally, I have to put my ear next to the camera to hear it). Canon did a lot right with this camera.

 

[Peter Stelzhammer]

there are certain "rules" about fans, fan speeds, fan noise, fan efficiency… and one of the rules is the following; the smaller a fan is, the more rpm/speed is needed to blow the same amount of air through the tunnel when compared with a bigger fan… that's why small computers are often louder then big computers - because they use 40-60mm fans instead of 80-120mm fans (ok, server/rackmount is a different topic). I could go more into detail but I think it is easy enough to follow… the EPIC/SCARLET is a (very) small camera with tightly packed electronics and a lot of processing power to get all the stuff done (I'd say more then the C300, but Im not an expert here… just looking at the file size-throughput I'd say it has to be the case). With a smaller footprint and surface (the total surface available is also a big factor to dissipate heat) and only space for a small fan I see why the increased fan speed between recording slow-downs is needed to get rid of the heat…

if it's the best concept to go with just one small fan at the front position -> I don't know, I'm not a camera engineer after all…
I just did some PC-modding and overclocking and stuff like that some time ago, building water coolers for my CPU, stacking up high-rpm fans with fan-ducts and so on (back then when it was just starting, without commercial solutions available…). This meant gaining some knowledge of various fan types, quality differences (e.g. why an ebm-papst fan is so much better then many other brands), tricks in getting better cooling-results (e.g. why sucking is better then blowing [don't get that wrong guys])… this is a wide field… don't know what RED has tried on that front and what not. Fact is: there are quality differences between fan manufacturers and models… and another thing is that fans have a limited lifetime and can get "bad" (making untypical noise is one of the problems). One part of overclocking (although the smaller part) was actually silencing stuff, underclocking/volting and so on. It was all about getting stuff silent… simple things like mounting your fan with rubber shock absorbers, exchanging cheap fans with quality fans, small fans with bigger and more silent fans… you get the idea. Got some interesting insights from that (but I don't think you can easily translate all of that to the DSMC-system)

One thing to mention about the fan installed on the DSMC-system; it is a removable/exchangeable part… I think even user-exchangeable as a service-part (I've read that somewhere I think, maybe in the manual)… So I would not be surprised if the fan gets revised at some point and users will be updated - just as it was the case with the OLPF bushing.

there are fans with different and interesting concepts out there -> I especially like Verax.
And as mentioned ebm-papst as a fan company itself -> they are so much better then other fans out there when it comes to quality, noise-level, life-time…

I'm on an EPIC-X here and don't have any problems with the fan-noise… just to mention.

 

[Glen Powell]

I truly love my scarlet,but annoyed with couple of design flows. ... and the cmos being in a tunnel which makes wide leica lenses impossible to use.

I personally don't see this as a design flaw - I'll only ever use PL cine lenses, Leica lenses will never touch it. By your logic it's a design flaw that my iPhone can't use a PL lens; it just wasn't designed that way. My pick-up truck wasn't designed to race F1, not a design flaw. I could go on

Fan noise hasn't been a problem either; takes a while to figure out how to manage it, but now it doesn't cause any problems even with the most hard core noise averse sound guy I work with.

 

[PatrickW]

Would you pay for a unit with an external cooling unit that was silent?
Would you be fine with it potentially voiding your warranty?

 

[Dmitry Burenok]

Really funny comparison between Scarlet X (at least, hundreds of cameras being used worldwide) and C300 (which is technically NOT released yet, still pre-production prototype, by the way). Ha ha. Once some one get C300 maybe we can discuss more about noise and other factors critical for the image quality.

 

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

XF codec has been around for a while and I imagine encoder chips are quite low power as they have been in many low power camcorders, as are 1080p processing components. The C300 is a 1080p camera in essentially every way even the way it samples at the sensor, since (as I understand it from Canon's literature) it essentially does a 2x2 bin debayer, one of the easiest and coarsest debayers around. RED has a lot more processing power and it is a lot more flexible and it has to handle real 4k images through most of its image processing pipeline. It is significantly more processor intensive to properly debayer 4k and compress/record it while also properly downscaling it to 1080p for monitoring than it is to simply do a 2x2 bin debayer once which simultaneously does essentially a nearest neighbor downscale in the process (essentially improper debayer and improper downscale, and some have seen the effect of this in its color fringing and aliasing).

C300 draws 10w and Scarlet draws 50w, and 50w of electronics is likely to have at least proportionally higher thermal dissipation, thus the need for greater active cooling. Scarlet contains electronics designed for 5k data throughput and the C300 only 1080p, and does realtime processing on over 4x as much data, so maybe it isn't so surprising it draws about 4x as much power.

So why does the C300 draw twice as much power as the FS100 which has similar capabilities and uses a more complex encoder and probably more complex downscaling?

 

[Mike P.]

Does anyone know the db rating of the Scarlet's/Epic's fan at the best safe operating speed and highest speed? I guess it'd also be nice to have the cfm and rotational speed of the fan as well. There are plenty of "silent" computer fans available at all sizes, so it should be possible to swap for a less noisey one (warranty gone, but I was referring more to RED switching to a quieter fan assuming one is available.)

 

[Togan Gokbakar]

I personally don't see this as a design flaw - I'll only ever use PL cine lenses, Leica lenses will never touch it. By your logic it's a design flaw that my iPhone can't use a PL lens; it just wasn't designed that way. My pick-up truck wasn't designed to race F1, not a design flaw. I could go on

Dear Glen
If it is not meant to be used with leica lenses why there is a leica mount in production. And why Red one can be used with all the leica m lenses and epic/scarlet can't? Also by your logic if phone 3 can use PL lenses and iPhone 4 can't use them because the shape of its case ,you will say that it is not a flaw or drawback it is a design feature.

 

[Togan Gokbakar]

XF codec has been around for a while and I imagine encoder chips are quite low power as they have been in many low power camcorders, as are 1080p processing components. The C300 is a 1080p camera in essentially every way even the way it samples at the sensor, since (as I understand it from Canon's literature) it essentially does a 2x2 bin debayer, one of the easiest and coarsest debayers around. RED has a lot more processing power and it is a lot more flexible and it has to handle real 4k images through most of its image processing pipeline. It is significantly more processor intensive to properly debayer 4k and compress/record it while also properly downscaling it to 1080p for monitoring than it is to simply do a 2x2 bin debayer once which simultaneously does essentially a nearest neighbor downscale in the process (essentially improper debayer and improper downscale, and some have seen the effect of this in its color fringing and aliasing).

C300 draws 10w and Scarlet draws 50w, and 50w of electronics is likely to have at least proportionally higher thermal dissipation, thus the need for greater active cooling. Scarlet contains electronics designed for 5k data throughput and the C300 only 1080p, and does realtime processing on over 4x as much data, so maybe it isn't so surprising it draws about 4x as much power.

So why does the C300 draw twice as much power as the FS100 which has similar capabilities and uses a more complex encoder and probably more complex downscaling?

Thanks for the technical explanation Noah. I get the 50W situation.

 

[Michael Dalton]

Does anyone know the db rating of the Scarlet's/Epic's fan at the best safe operating speed and highest speed? I guess it'd also be nice to have the cfm and rotational speed of the fan as well. There are plenty of "silent" computer fans available at all sizes, so it should be possible to swap for a less noisey one (warranty gone, but I was referring more to RED switching to a quieter fan assuming one is available.)

Mike you bring up an interesting point. Does anyone know the best settings to get fan as quiet as possible during shooting. We can set how much the fan comes on. Does it need to run at the defaults to be safe or can we cut it to say 10% if we are not shooting more then a minute or two at time. Does anyone know?

 

[Carey Lee Coffey]

Doesn't the fan shut off when you press record like the Red One?

 

[Niko Pueringer]

This is a non-issue. The fan drops to silent levels when you hit record.

/thread.

 

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

I would think this may vary. The lowest fan setting is 25%, and in some quick tests I did yesterday it seems the camera will overheat if that setting is used for long periods. I tried incrementally increasing the fan speed to see which allowed sustained temperatures below 75C (overheat threshold) and found 35% was about right, but the temperatures were still a bit high in the high 60C's range.

I also did a test where I put on a lens cap and put the record fan level around 25% and just left the camera recording starting at ~46C all the way until it hit 75C. Looking at the images in RC-X at ISO3200 there was a visible image noise and black level increase as the camera heated up. I did another black balance with the camera running around 70C and found it helped a bit in reducing noise in this environment. It is worth considering that it's not just a question of how low you can set your fan to avoid hitting 75C and overheating, but there is also a tradeoff where if you allow the camera to heat up even if it does not overheat your images may have a higher noise floor.

For the cleanest images, if you are shooting MOS, it may make sense to crank the fan up all the time. What's interesting is I wonder if to some extent it is preferable to keep the camera temperature consistent rather than low when idle and high when recording since it may not be desirable to have a changing noise floor during recording takes.

 

[Mike P.]

Mike you bring up an interesting point. Does anyone know the best settings to get fan as quiet as possible during shooting. We can set how much the fan comes on. Does it need to run at the defaults to be safe or can we cut it to say 10% if we are not shooting more then a minute or two at time. Does anyone know?

The fan is adjustable - recording speed and idle speed can be set independently - but as Noah pointed out, temperature affects the image. Not only that, but it would affect your Black Calibration setting as well (temp is a factor in BC.)

I guess my only concern is that I'd like to be able to set it and forget it, not having to worry about adjusting it to a higher value because it just so happens to be 30c ambient temp that day instead of the regular 20c (or what have you). More over, if getting if reducing the fan noise by 10-25% is as simple as putting in a quieter fan (that costs a maximum of $5 more than a regular one), then why wouldn't you do it? I think regular fans are around 30db, but there are some (with the same cfm) that hit 12-18db (which is super quiet).

The only reason they wouldn't do this - and I'm guessing this is what's happening - is if the noise is created not by the fan's rotation, but by the air (the amount of it and how fast is passes through) being forced/pushed through the heatsink fins (which is very likely the case, and can't be avoided by a quieter fan.)

I've never seen the thermal design of a Scarlet/Epic, but (like everything) it can probably be improved -- simple things, like better thermal compound (both a better application and better type) can reduce temperature as by a few degrees celcius... Polishing/lapping the heatsink with 2000grit sand paper (to a mirror finish) can reduce temps by another few degrees. That right there would be enough to keep it at a much more comfortable low-60s at 35% (instead of high-60s) and the costs would be negligible.