DEFINITION November 2019

FEATURE | NEW CAMERAS

CANON C500 MARK II Not to be outdone in the world of

lightweight, full-frame cameras, Canon announced the EOS C500 Mark II days before IBC. The C500 Mark II is to the C700 FF much as the Alexa Mini LF is to the full-size Alexa LF. Canon enjoys massive experience making full-frame cameras, having launched possibly the first full-frame motion camera in the world, albeit perhaps by mistake, in the guise of the 5D Mark II. The C500 Mark II is under two kilos and has a 5952 x 3140 sensor recording to either XF-AVC at 810Mbps or Canon’s cinema Raw at 2.1Gbps. For the size and weight it is incredibly capable, offering the full 6K sensor at 60fps or 2K at 120fps. One significant Canon plus point is a long-term dedication to autofocus, and more or less the only autofocus option that’s ever been taken even slightly seriously by the film and TV industry. While it’s not a new feature in the C500 Mark II, the increasing affordability of full-frame video cameras is likely to mean they’re deployed on smaller, faster-moving productions that are less well-equipped with people and time to perform high-precision manual focus pulling. That concern has almost certainly already sold both lenses and cameras for Canon. At £14,200, the C500 Mark II is not quite in the indie filmmaker range, but it’s certainly increasing the number of productions that can afford to shoot full- frame pictures in Raw.

PANASONIC S1H To address the indie filmmaker question – or perhaps the crash-cam question – we can stay in full-frame world with the Panasonic S1H. It is ostensibly a stills camera, albeit a beast of a stills camera at around a kilo, compared to the 890g Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. The S1H has several things that manufacturers have historically been hesitant to offer in stills cameras, including 10-bit recording at up to 400Mbps with 4:2:2 colour sub-sampling and intra-frame compression using either HEVC or H.264. There’s a waveform monitor and a 22 watt- hour battery that sounds small, but for a stills camera is fairly gargantuan. While codecs can vary in quality, that’s a very useful combination of features, especially for a £3600 machine that can (briefly) sit in one hand and masquerade as a stills camera. There’s enough spare resolution on the S1H to shoot 4K from a super-35mm-sized area of the sensor without scaling, and while maintaining the 400Mbps bitrate. Frame rates go up to 120fps in HD, albeit recorded as more heavily compressed 8-bit 4:2:0. In the end, the S1H is reasonably expensive, and it’s a mirrorless camera that’s heavier than many DSLRs, but Panasonic will attract attention for having included features that previously existed only at the high end.

ABOVE Canon has added to its full-frame range with the C500 Mark II

One significant Canon plus point is a long- term dedication to autofocus

54 DEF I N I T ION | NOVEMBER 20 1 9

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