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Scarlet VS Canon C500

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jorge krausch

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The Canon C500 is also a 4K camera.. does it stand up to Scarlet's qualities?
 
jorge krausch said:
The Canon C500 is also a 4K camera.. does it stand up to Scarlet's qualities?
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It costs way more than a Scarlet to get a full working C500 configuration, besides spending money on the camera you have to spend another 6K USD or more on a external recorder and then a lot of SSDs if you're going to be recording Canon RAW (since it is uncompressed RAW unlike REDCODE which allows for compression ratios)...

Also no one has really done a side to side comparison yet , but you can see some of the C300 vs Scarlet comparisons to get a rough idea of how the footage will look (since the C500 uses the same sensor as the C300)

For example with a Gemini 4:4:4 External Recorder, you're going to only get a few minutes out of a very large SSD and in some cases to record 4K CANON RAW you need 2 Gemini recorders (doubling the price required to 12k for the recorders alone) - http://www.convergent-design.com/Portals/0/Gemini444/Docs/C500Support_111912.pdf

As of now the C500 will have the advantage in low light, but when the DRAGON sensor comes, it'll be a different story. :)

I think for the price a full working C500 setup would cost, it would be more ideal to compare it to the EPIC, in which case there is no comparison even in terms of frame rates and resolution :)
 
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Malvin Ng said:
It costs way more than a Scarlet to get a full working C500 configuration, besides spending money on the camera you have to spend another 6K USD or more on a external recorder and then a lot of SSDs if you're going to be recording Canon RAW (since it is uncompressed RAW unlike REDCODE which allows for compression ratios)...

Also no one has really done a side to side comparison yet , but you can see some of the C300 vs Scarlet comparisons to get a rough idea of how the footage will look (since the C500 uses the same sensor as the C300)

For example with a Gemini 4:4:4 External Recorder, you're going to only get a few minutes out of a very large SSD and in some cases to record 4K CANON RAW you need 2 Gemini recorders (doubling the price required to 12k for the recorders alone) - http://www.convergent-design.com/Portals/0/Gemini444/Docs/C500Support_111912.pdf

As of now the C500 will have the advantage in low light, but when the DRAGON sensor comes, it'll be a different story. :)

I think for the price a full working C500 setup would cost, it would be more ideal to compare it to the EPIC, in which case there is no comparison even in terms of frame rates and resolution :)
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AGREE! but also it depends of course on the style of your project)
 
C500 iso and gamma (I think? or was it iso and white balance) are baked in, in RAW mode. And it's raw RAW, not compressed like the way RED does it- so it takes up A LOT of space; and like what the people above me said, you can't even do it out of the box (like a RED), it needs an external recorder(s). Something to keep in mind.
 
I've actually had my hands on each.

C500 (and C300) perform better in low light (and yes I've seen the scientific explanations to the contrary. But we had a shoot last week that I know my Scarlet would have been noisey as hell on, and both the C300 and C500 looked great.) But given proper practices, there are only a few specific scenarios in which I'd prefer to use them. I hate, with a passion, all Canon software/firmware. They make design decisions that are just absolutely batty. But the cameras do perform better in low light than Scarlet.

But, for the cost of a C500 and necessary accessories: get an Epic.

If you want to shoot 4k at 24fps, there really is no comparison. Get a Scarlet. Every day, all day. No matter what.
 
Cannot comment on the C500 as I've not tested this, however we now shoot all our interviews on the C300 and it really is a fantastic camera. It's BBC approved for HD delivery, it's compact, uses very little power and it is virtually silent in operation. You also don't need to use a sound mixer on the C300 so in terms of usability, it really is wonderful and our guys constantly pick this up before our Epic.

The C300 and 500 are kings in low light - we just completed a overseas shoot where we had one Dedolight and one small LED lamp for shooting our interviews - we created really great footage on this camera and I know we just could not have achieved this on the Epic.

Interesting times right now with both Canon and Sony nipping at RED's heels - always expect the unexpected from Mr Jannard so I'm sure we'll hear interesting announcements re. Dragon and a Pro Res 1080p and 4K compact low cost recorder soon enough.

Scott
 
Yes, it's better in low-light, I made a shootout for "Digital Production" (Munich) side-by-side with a Scarlet under identical conditions.

But on the C300 you have to carefully tweak your image for the desired look in camera (which is doable with the very flexible adjustments) and then you are nailed to your decisions. It falls apart quickly with any massive grading in post. Even an external recorder won't help much, since it stays 8 bit.

I didn't have the C500 for a test, but I second what has been said here about cost of external recording. One of the core advantages of RED is the compressed RAW recording. Plus, if the sensor in the C500 is read in the same way as in the C300, it's far from RED's resolution. In the C300, they don't debayer like anybody else and that gives them some advantages, but for 1080 results only. Even the good low-light capability is coming from that, if you read their white papers carefully.
 
Hi, I have both Scarlet and the C300, there is no real comparison, they are two different cameras, the only advantage of the C300 is very low light and a very easy edit with small files. For quality and look Scarlet knocks the socks of the C300. Game over.

C300 quick turn around jobs but looks like video, no getting around 8bit colour. RAW has the depth and look, that is what matters.

Everything I do at present is 1080, but I have 4K material, best of both worlds.
 
John Wee said:
C500? Good luck editing uncompressed RAW
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Good luck storing it. Will be at least 3 times as large as Red files (shot 3:1). Spiderman and Hobbit were shot at 5:1 or 6:1, and many shoots for broadcast TV are shot 8:1 or even 10:1. So between 3-10 times the file size for comparable footage. Redcode really is amazing...
 
Saumene Mehrdady said:
C500 iso and gamma (I think? or was it iso and white balance) are baked in, in RAW mode. And it's raw RAW, not compressed like the way RED does it- so it takes up A LOT of space; and like what the people above me said, you can't even do it out of the box (like a RED), it needs an external recorder(s). Something to keep in mind.
Click to expand...

http://nofilmschool.com/2012/11/canon-c500-shipping-raw-4k/

Yea its raw.... sort of isnt Raw.... you just debayer in post. Which boggles my mind.....
 
To be fair, ISO isn't indicative of whether or not a format is raw... it is merely a representation of a known quantity of brightness steps (in stops/industry standard ASA ratings). Hence why RED say, 'there is no native ISO, we just suggest 800 since it offers a clean SNR.' Same with whitebalance; essentially any format that is non-destructive is raw, as you can change the white point without corrupting the image at all.... It just may not be labeled "whitebalance" or be as easy to do. So the difference is that RED have those tools built into RCX and are labeled accordingly for the most ease of use.

But even that isn't the best representation for all people; for example, I still think Stills raw (like CR2s) is the best implementation -- the "fill" and "recovery" sliders are the cat's pajamas and nothing in RCX comes close to them (in my opinion). They maintain saturation and contrast in the highlights and shadows that they brighten/darken... none of the tools in RCX do that, which means you have to bring it into Resolve (or some other CC software) and use secondaries (and render) and basically kill off a lot of the "raw"ness of REDcode. Now, I know you should be doing that anyway, but you'd save a buttload of time if you could does fill/recovery tweaks in your first pass in RCX. And because it isn't implemented in that way (with simple "fill/recovery" sliders), I fear it's a limitation of REDcode rather than a simple matter of creating the tool/slider within RCX... In other words, it should have been there from the start. Every time I open up a still file I'm always surprised at how much more tweakability the default tools have over REDcode/RCX... even with "crummy" 10mpx XTi stills (5k is 14mpx); they're just so much better (and this is coming from a guy that actually wanted to ditch DSLRs when buying into DSMC.)
 
I'm not familiar with the Fill or Recovery sliders. However, are you using the FLUT slider to it's full effect in RedCine-X? It's pretty powerful for adjusting exposure while maintaining the highs and lows in the image. You also have Lift/Gama/Gain settings, which used well can do quite a bit.

NOTE: I'm not disagreeing with you; I really don't have a good concept of what Fill or Recovery does. Just wondering if you've used the other tools available (since you didn't specifically state that you do or do not).

Also, RedCine has gotten UNBELIEVABLY better in a relatively short amount of time. 2.5 years ago it was just RedCine. Then there was RedCine-X. Now it's RedCine-X Pro. It is absolutely incredible how much the tools supplied by Red have improved over time. Which is to say: if there are not appropriate tools for Fill/Recovery right now, they can certainly be added in the future, and would be worth suggesting to the right people that work on RedCine-X (look around in the RedCine-X section of the Workflow forum and you can find the appropriate RedNames to send a suggestion to).
 
I use pretty much everything in RCXp. It isn't a matter of RCXp being bad at what it does (it's pretty damn awesome), it's that the fill/recovery tools that are available for raw stills is exceptional. For the most part I'd say RCXp does some pretty straightforward things that we're used, but doesn't really take advantage of the rawness (with the exception of really easy to use wb and ISO/FLUT settings.) Alchemy group is pretty awesome, but those are more 'bling-bling' features, rather than functions that get the most (or more) out of the image (which is what fill and recovery do.)

Other cameras, (F65 and CinemaDNG footage) have both of those functions (although they may be called something different) and they just work... On stills it's usually better than I expect... you'll be like, "whoop, sky is completely blown out", then start sliding the recovered over and get colour and clouds back from seemingly white. In order to even attempt to get it back on REDraw you'd need to mask the entire sky in a secondary outside of RCXp, which takes tons of time compared to the slider (rendering and setting it up). If you try to do it with just curves/life/gamma/gain unilaterally across the entire image, you'll just end up messing with the mids (or lows, if you're using fill).

Also, FLUT is proof that ISO adjustment is somewhat irrelevant when establishing a file format as raw (since FLUT is essentially ISO, but without the known stops as steps in its adjustment.)

I like the storage savings of REDcode, but it's kind of frustrating knowing it's raw and that there is still soooo much more in the image data that has yet to be taken advantage of. Sometimes I think we're still limited by oldschool film thinking when it comes to processing digital negatives. I get the importance of using Resolve (or any colour correction software), but I'd still love the ability to do even more of the broad strokes before leaving RCXp. When I see other cameras doing so out of the gate, I can't help but be slightly envious...(which, to be fair, quickly goes away when I see the price tags of those other camera systems... OH, and I don't know if the C500 actually has some of these higher functions either.)
 
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Ahh, I get it now. Fill/Recovery are like the SoftClip controls in DaVinci Resolve. It would be nice to have that added into Redcine-X and the SDK. Wonder if any Rednames are listening to this thread...
 
I would say it's similar (just as a secondary could achieve similar results), but the fill/recovery extract the information from the raw data (at the raw level?) , rather than masking then and just bringing the levels down or up. On paper it sounds like should be the same (and maybe they are), however I find the results are always awesome as it doesn't require tweaking at all (to contrast, colour, saturation)... Everything falls into place as you adjust one simple slider... Download a CR2 still (or f65 footage... or cinemaDNG footage) from the web and load it into Photoshop (or anything really) -- the raw control window comes up automatically and it'll show you exactly what I mean.

Again, it's not that the results couldn't be achieved, it's just a lot of additional rigamarole (and render time) for tweaks that are often necessary to get the most of the image. Fill is, essentially, a digital fill light that actually works (within reason) and recovery pulls a crapload of detail out of highlights that you thought were blown, and they both work without causing the mids to go wonky. I get the feeling RED don't implement it because they're somewhat automatic functions (simple sliders) and similar results can be achieved "by hand" during colour correction... The thing is, I bet it'd be more than adequate 95% of time and you could always add a secondary/mask after getting the image more inline with the fill/recovery sliders.
 
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