Canon C300 Mark Ii Sample Footage Download
Canon C300 Sample Footage Chart

Recently, AbelCine organized a focus group with select cinematographers and specialists from Canon to review the new Dual Pixel Auto Focus (DAF) upgrade for. Canon C300 Mark II Cinema EOS Camcorder with Dual Pixel CMOS AF (EF Lens Mount) features Super 35mm CMOS Sensor, 4K,1920x1080 60/50i, 23.98/25p True 24p. Review Canon Professional Camcorders, Canon. It guides you through the process of converting C300 MK II 4K XF-AVC MXF files to ProRes/DNxHD codec for use in DaVinci Resolve with optimum performance. Together with the two new cameras Canon EOS C300 Mark II and XC10, Canon has introduced a new video format for the 4K, 2K and HD Recording, XF-AVC. It uses compression MPEG-4 AVC / H.264.

One of our long time readers Dave May has been lucky enough to be shooting with the new Canon EOS C300 Mark III. Above you can see his hands-on video where he goes into considerable detail about the camera’s features and how it performs.

Dave is also a C500 Mark II owner so he talks about the differences between the two cameras.

Make sure you also check out our in-depth coverage of the C300 Mark III announcement on the site.

Above you can see footage from a cooking test shoot using the 120fps 4K and 180fps 2K RAW capabilities of the new Canon C300 Mark III camera.

Dave was very impressed with the ability to be able to record non-cropped 4K at 120fps. He was also surprised at how well the 2K (Super 16mm crop) at 180fps looked, especially if you were shooting in Cinema RAW Lite.

I caught up with Dave to ask him about his experiences using the C300 Mark III. You can see the full interview above.

My biggest take away from talking to Dave, and this information came after we recorded the interview, was that the new Dual Gain Output sensor is offering a lot of improvement in the shadows and mids. From Dave’s tests, I couldn’t see any noticeable improvement in highlight protection, but it does appear to have slightly better highlight roll-off than the C500 Mark II.

From the tests, it looks like the C300 Mark II is achieving that extra dynamic range by giving you extra stops in the shadows and mids. What this means is that you can protect your highlights while being able to raise up the mids and shadows without seeing nasty amounts of noise being introduced. From Dave’s tests, it does appear that the Dual Gain Output works better at the camera’s native ISO of 800. Once you start increasing the ISO levels it doesn’t seem to work as well.

Image copyright Dave May (@davetallstory)

The extra claimed dynamic range that the C300 Mark III has seems to be below middle grey. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable difference in terms of how many highlight stops you are getting if you compare the camera directly to the C500 mark II.

Image copyright Dave May (@davetallstory)

Above you can see the obvious noise difference it makes when the DGO is activated on the C300 Mark III and when it is not activated when shooting at higher frame rates.

Image copyright Dave May (@davetallstory)

Above you can clearly see the difference between the C300 Mark III and C500 Mark II when shooting in RAW.

The other big improvement over the C500 Mark II is not only the ability to shoot in higher frame rates but that you can take advantage of Canon’s DPAF when shooting at frame rates over 60p when using a compatible lens. Being able to use autofocus when shooting moving objects at high speed is very useful. This is something you can’t do with the C500 mark II.

Other key points

Autofocus was working great at 120fps, doesn’t cut out when you go into S&F mode
Face detection only works up to 60fps base, not in S&F
RAW recording times are really reasonable at 120fps, not much more than XF-AVC. Looking at the image quality now it’s really solid, so I see this as a big positive because the file sizes of RAW light have been a barrier to me wanting to record with it
XF-AVC is holding up really well, similar to the C500MKII. I would say you can confidently shoot XF-AVC for most things, but then bust out the RAW when you’re really looking to push the image in post or want that flexibility of selecting a new picture profile/white balance in post
Dual gain Output sensor is certainly providing more dynamic range
3.5 second bootup time

Big thanks to Dave May and James Gilligan for all their help and time in creating this hands-on.

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Editing Canon C300 MXF footage? Follow our tips to make video editing with C300 MXF footage go as smoothly as possible.

Working with Canon C300 footage – which is XDCAM 422 50/Mbs footage in a .MXF wrapper – should ordinarily be quite straight forward. MXF files will work natively in Adobe Premiere and ingest quite happily through a free plugin in Final Cut Pro 7 and FCPX. You can also bring this footage in through AMA into Avid Media Composer 6. AbelCine has an excellent step by step guide to importing C300 footage in Adobe Premiere CS6, Final Cut Pro X, FCP 7 and Avid Media Composer 6. You can check it out here.

Everything will work seamlessly, that is, if your cards have been copied correctly to the hard drive with their entire folder structure intact. Without that folder structure you are effectively locked out of accessing your footage and an editing application like FCP7 will give you an error message like this one:

How to Copy MXF Files Correctly

So how do you copy cards correctly?

Canon C300 Mark Ii Sample Footage Download

Well first, and this may go without saying, but if you’re going to get an intern or producer to do it make sure they know what they’re doing. Essentially you must copy the entire card structure (preferably not through dragging and dropping in the finder).

Sony and Canon both have free browser apps that will let you back up your media. Or you could invest in something like Shotput Pro to duplicate your cards to multiple drives simultaneously. You are backing them up as you go, right?

If that’s not enough detail, just watch this great tutorial on a correct tapeless media workflow from Shane Ross. Although the tutorial winds up in Final Cut Pro 7, the initial principles are the same for any system. If you want even more tips, check out this great video from Chase Jarvis on his complete tapeless workflow.

What To Do If Your C300 Card Structure Is Broken

If for whatever reason your card structure doesn’t come across intact, what can you do?

Depending on your NLE you have various options. If you’re in Adobe Premiere it doesn’t matter, as it will read the MXF files just fine.

First, you can try to ‘fake it’ out by recreating the C300 card structure (which should look like the example below). In the past I’m sure I’ve gotten lucky with it but its a pretty slim chance of actually working.

FCPX needs a correct card structure so if you have to, transcoding in a 3rd party app is a feasible workaround.

Free App For Converting C300 MXF Files

Miro is a great free app (one of the few free apps I found) that actually works and works well. Miro Video Converter will allow you to grab the .MXF files and transcode them into Pro Res 422, DNxHD and AVC Intra 1080p and 720p. You can batch transcode as many of them as you like and it works pretty quickly. The files look great and were a higher quality than files I created using the demo of MXF Converter for Mac from Pavtube. But as Miro is a free app, there are a few catches.

First, you cannot specify the output folder and it defaults to your MacHD > User > Movies folder. So you need to have enough space on your boot drive to transcode the footage too. This is also a problem if you have multiple files with the same name, (which I had on this edit with a two camera shoot) as this means you have to transcode one set at a time and

Canon C300 Sample Footage