USER REVI EW | CANON XF 705
Canon’s very successful XF range of broadcast cameras is joined by the highly communicative and high-resolution XF705 CANON XF705 AMCORDER PRICE £6999/$6999
WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL
anon’s XF range of camcorders has always been one of our favourites, mainly
SPECI F I CAT IONS 4K: UHD/50P UP TO 160MBPS XF-HEVC: 4K UHD/50P 4:2:2 10-BIT HDR: HLG/PQ INTERNAL RECORDING AND OUTPUT 12G-SDI: SINGLE CABLE 25.5-382.5 15X L-SERIES ZOOM SENSOR: 1.0-TYPE CMOS IMAGE PROCESSOR: DUAL DIGIC DV6 4K UHD TRANSFER WIDE-ANGLE LENS:
because they are great workhorse cameras. This form factor of fixed lens and multiple buttons to hand is a busy shooter’s dream. We love the way they compress footage at high rates with accessible codecs and store the resulting MXF files on nice, freely available, relatively cheap media – this time SD cards, not Compact Flash. For the 2018 model, which is called the XF705, the improvements are totally predictable but no less impressive. Using the HEVC-XF codec you can now shoot UHD, which is 3840x2160 at 50p and in 4:2:2 10-bit. We used Lexar 1000x SD cards, which can record to 150MB/s; the XF705 tops out at 160Mbps. HEVC stands for High Efficiency Video Codec, which is the way 4K is compressed for delivery to homes. Our 64GB Lexar cards gave us around 110 minutes in 4K from the two SD card slots on the side of the body at the 160Mbps mode. You can shoot with Canon’s XF-AVC codec if you’re not quite ready for 4K UHD, but resolution and quality is down to 1920x1080 with a sorry 4:2:0 8-bit result. As you can choose the option of 1920x1080 using the HEVC option, you shouldn’t need XF-AVC; the only reason would be if your NLE couldn’t deal with the new HEVC codec, which may be a problem initially.
BELOW The new Canon XF705 ticks all the boxes and includes HDR recording and streaming formats.
68 DEF I N I T ION | NOVEMBER 20 1 8
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