BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES: Camera Shootout
During our first camera workshop i got the chance to compare both the C300 and the URSA, two high end cameras that we might use for both "Through the Medium" and "D-eb31e". Therefore i shot a few test shots with different settings to see how both cameras look.
Comparing size and form, the C300 has a nice form factor, and can be mounted on various acessories such as the Glidecam or the Motion Control Slider. It has a familiar menu, same as the XF305 and can handle high ISO's. It's also connected to the Samurai Blade, therefore can do 10bit in Avid's DNxHD.
However this also means that a cable needs to be connected to the blade, and the blade needs to be mounted on to the camera. The plus side though is that if we want we could create two sets of files, one internally for backup, and one using the blade as our main source.
Looking at the image, it's a pretty clean image, however there is a bit of artificial sharpening. This can probably be fixed by changing the settings on the camera.
Also using the provided LUT to convert it back to Rec.709 gives a pleasing image, but loses information through the black areas. This can be fixed by color grading before applying the LUT, however the color representation seems a bit too "videoish". (Note: This is just my personal opinion)
The Blackmagic URSA is big and bulky, so it would possibly only work on heavy duty tripods, handheld for short amounts of time or on a heavy duty rig.
However the image quality (when appropriately lit) is phenomenal in my opinion. It has good natural looking sharpness even in ProRez, and using the DaVinci Resolve (free software) it can be outputed to a very pleasing version of Rec.709 with great colors, or also converted to linear light for Visual Effects use, or other film stocks such as Kodak and Fujifilm.
RAW recording, as i discovered whilst trying to get a beautiful shot of Shahid shaking a fanta bottle in slow motion, needs two CFast cards simultaneously, as odd frames are put on one card and even frames on the other. Because we only had one card, and were also trying to do 80 frames per second in raw, only half of the frames were captured, and after one point the camera started dropping frames due to the write speed needed. Also processing times in Davinci for raw are MASSIVE, whereas ProRez on a high end computer or even a Macbook Pro work at realtime.
I'm leaning towards the Blackmagic URSA as the main camera i want to use, however if we need to do specialist shots (Glidecam, Slider, Low Light) we might use the C300, depending on availability.
Here is a compilation of the test shots with and without LUTS:
Comparing size and form, the C300 has a nice form factor, and can be mounted on various acessories such as the Glidecam or the Motion Control Slider. It has a familiar menu, same as the XF305 and can handle high ISO's. It's also connected to the Samurai Blade, therefore can do 10bit in Avid's DNxHD.
However this also means that a cable needs to be connected to the blade, and the blade needs to be mounted on to the camera. The plus side though is that if we want we could create two sets of files, one internally for backup, and one using the blade as our main source.
Looking at the image, it's a pretty clean image, however there is a bit of artificial sharpening. This can probably be fixed by changing the settings on the camera.
Also using the provided LUT to convert it back to Rec.709 gives a pleasing image, but loses information through the black areas. This can be fixed by color grading before applying the LUT, however the color representation seems a bit too "videoish". (Note: This is just my personal opinion)
The Blackmagic URSA is big and bulky, so it would possibly only work on heavy duty tripods, handheld for short amounts of time or on a heavy duty rig.
However the image quality (when appropriately lit) is phenomenal in my opinion. It has good natural looking sharpness even in ProRez, and using the DaVinci Resolve (free software) it can be outputed to a very pleasing version of Rec.709 with great colors, or also converted to linear light for Visual Effects use, or other film stocks such as Kodak and Fujifilm.
RAW recording, as i discovered whilst trying to get a beautiful shot of Shahid shaking a fanta bottle in slow motion, needs two CFast cards simultaneously, as odd frames are put on one card and even frames on the other. Because we only had one card, and were also trying to do 80 frames per second in raw, only half of the frames were captured, and after one point the camera started dropping frames due to the write speed needed. Also processing times in Davinci for raw are MASSIVE, whereas ProRez on a high end computer or even a Macbook Pro work at realtime.
I'm leaning towards the Blackmagic URSA as the main camera i want to use, however if we need to do specialist shots (Glidecam, Slider, Low Light) we might use the C300, depending on availability.
Here is a compilation of the test shots with and without LUTS:
0 comments: