I’ve received my Kessler Pocket Jib Traveler today and have posted a bunch of photo’s along with my initial thoughts about it.

Click here to read the review.

I’ve just posted a full review of the Atomos Ninja 2 which I’ve been using with the Canon C100.

Click here to read the review…

I haven’t posted many updates lately so sorry for that. I’ve been working on a project involving a lot of two camera interviews using my Canon C100 and C300. This has been a good test for the profiles I created to match the camera and so far it’s going really well, the images from each camera are really close and I’m finding that with careful setup of exposure the results cut together well with the same grade applied.

The one thing that seems to let the the C100 down slightly is of course it’s internal 4:2:0 codec writing at 24MB/s, this doesn’t hold up as well as the C300‘s 4:2:2 codec at 50 MB/s. Below are some frame grabs showing one of the interviews I’ve shot and you will notice that although the C100 close up looks very similar to the wider C300 shot, closer inspection reveals compression artefacts that become more apparent when the footage is graded.

Both cameras were shooting in log with a minimal grade applied as an adjustment layer in Premiere CS6. I used Premieres RGB curves effect to add a shallow S curve and added some saturation using the fast color corrector tool. I’ll need to spend more time on the grade later in production but for now this gives a rough idea of how it effects the compression artefacts. Both the ungraded and graded screen grabs are shown below.

The wider shot was recorded with the C300 fitted with a Canon 50mm f/1.2 lens with the closeup recorded on the C100 with the Canon 70-200 f2.8 L. Both lenses were at f/2.8.

I’m going to be reviewing the Atomos Ninja-2 external recorder over the next few weeks to see how that improves the images from the C100. Because the camera outputs 4:2:2 over the HDMI port that should in theory produce results much closer to the C300. Watch this space for more on that very soon.