Graded Canon c100 footage

First off ,I would like to thank Neumannfilms for making his footage of the c100 available to download.  The footage can be found here:  http://www.neumannfilms.net/canon-c100-review/

I won't go much into the specs of the Canon C100 in this post. All that will go into my next post on what I would like to see in the rumored new budget Cinema camera from Canon.

After grading the footage from the C100, I got to see just how it handled. It handles pretty good, but the C100 has a price tag of $6500 and to get the most of the camera in 8bit 4,2,2 you'll need either a Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 SSD video recorder for around $328 plus SSD drives or an Atomos Ninja video recorder for just under a grand plus the SSD drives. Now you're looking at a price tag between $7000 to $8000 for a recorder and SSD's. For a price of $6500 I would like to see at least 8bit 4,2,2 in camera.

Grading the C100 footage straight from the camera I noticed when adjusting the curves to get some detail back instead of rising the mids I was dropping the mids a lot just to get some of the highlights and shadows back in the picture.  Another thing I noticed was skintones were alittle harder to get. The Vectorscopes were spread throughout and to find the "skintone" line took some time to get an even line on the scopes without it being spread throughout.

I will say the colors of the C100 look very good. The image is a step up from Canon DSLRs with a little better DR but nothing that just screams miles ahead better.  I was really impressed with the low light abilities, a few of the shots were at high iso's, one at 10,000 and one at 20,000. There is some noise but nothing a pass in a noise reduction program can't take care of. I thought the anamorphic file looked the best. After cropping and grading it looks the most cinematic.

 Test footage
http://vimeo.com/56536600 




Still grabs from the test video all are straight from the camera

pk films logo

I decided to mess around in Hitfilms today to see what I could come up with for a logo. I wanted to keep it simple but with some elements I like :) When I have more time to really dig into Hitfilms I will make it 3d animated. Thanks for looking.

Link to the logo
http://vimeo.com/56480139 

Kiron 28mm f2

I was looking for a lens around the 25mm range faster then f2.8 for my gh2 and Canon DSLR's.I went to KEH camera and started to look around the site and I found a Kiron 28mm f2 in excellent condition in Olympus mount for under a 100 dollars. The lens came quick and I tried it out and notice the aperture wasn't stopping down it was stuck wide open. I called KEH to see if maybe they had another Kiron in stock to exchange. They didn't but offered to charge me for a lower condition lens which was really nice of them. 

I went outside with my t3i and the Kiron lens. After taking a few pics, I wasn't mad at all that the lens wasn't stopping down. The bokeh the lens produce is really dreamy and even if it did  stop down, the lens would stay at f2. One of the biggest features of this lens besides the bokeh is the ability to focus down to right around just under a foot, making this lens a nice macro lens. I'll be using this lens mainly for close up shots because of its ability to focus so close and the bokeh . For the video side of things the Kiron has a nice focus throw for use with a follow focus. I tested the lens for video with my Gh2 and here is the quick test I did. 

Overall I'm very impressed with this little lens. Its fast aperture and close focus makes this lens a great buy. I'll be using this lens a good bit for both pics and video.

Test video Gh2

http://vimeo.com/54735097 

pics using the t3i

blurry pic but the kitties were fighting over camera time haha