FEATURE | CAPTURE
The new Canon EOS-1D XMark II offers 5.5K 12-bit Raw video internal recording to twin CFexpress cards
One significant Canon plus point is a long-term dedication to autofocus, and more or less the only autofocus option that’s 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 LUMIX 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 intraframe compression using either HEVC or H.264. There’s a waveformmonitor 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 35-sized area of the sensor without scaling, and while maintaining the 400Mbps bit rate. 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. The camera is also Netflix approved. RED RANGERS One camera range that is pointedly not selling a full-frame option is Red’s Ranger series. A Ranger camera with the company’s Monstro full-frame sensor, available only to rental houses, emerged in 2019. At IBC, however, Red announced the Helium and Gemini sensors would be available for sale in the Ranger chassis. As a departure from the modular DSMC series, the Ranger has an integrated body design that weighs about 3.5kg and records Red’s usual selection of its
own proprietary codec and ProRes. The choice between Helium, at 8192x3456, and Gemini, at 5120x2700, is more or less a statement of the core compromise of modern camera design. Both cameras have sensors just a little larger than the traditional Super 35 camera aperture, and it’s been shown in the past that 8K is a lot of photosites to fit on a fairly small area of silicon; the Gemini is therefore a nice choice to have. Helium achieves 60fps when recording the whole sensor, Gemini 96fps. The company claims 16.5 stops of dynamic range for both, though that’s a rather larger claim even than some cameras with considerably less dense sensors. CANON EOS-1D X MARK III Just when it seemed the DSLR had been overlooked as a professional filmmaking tool in favour of full-frame mirrorless cameras, Canon hits back with its new £6500/$6500 EOS-1D X Mark III. While primarily designed for professional sport photographers, it does have the highest spec of any non-cinema camera for filmmakers. The headline news is that it offers 5.5K 12-bit Raw video internal recording to twin
48 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 2020
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