I’ve always liked crane shots and more than once have been tempted to buy a small crane or Jib for my work but it’s generally one of those those things that require a lot of time to set up and pack away.  Most of my shooting requires me to work quickly and even grabbing my Kessler Stealth Slider for a few shots can prove tricky with tight schedules.

The only way a Jib would work for me is if I could use it in the same way as the slider by grabbing the bag, clipping the device to my existing tripod  and then quickly grab the shots without too much setup time. There are a few mobile jib solutions available but every solution I’ve looked at has required multiple parts to be bolted together before use and I just don’t want to deal with building kit mid shoot.

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Canon have released firmware 1.0.8.1.00 for the Canon EOS C300, and thankfully this time it’s downloadable and installable by the user. Thi release includes the fix of the green fringing on high contrast edges that was also seen in the 1.0.7.1.00 release. Interesting is the mention of EF lenses being controlled more reliably, there’s no details of which lenses are effected.

Here’s Canon’s actual change log…

1. Some of the EF lens products that can be mounted on the camera can be controlled more reliably.

2. Corrections to the Spanish and German language texts in the View Assistance function [View Assist.].

3. Efforts to correct image color fringing when a subject is of high contrast have been made.

Download links…

C300 firmware 1.0.8.1.00 – Canon Europe

C300 EF firmware 1.0.8.1.00 – Canon USA

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.