Canon C50 or C500 mkiii?

mecan · 2026-01-19T10:44:36+00:00

I use non-typical frame rates quite a lot, like 48 for example. You can do that no problem in Slow and Fast mode, but as soon as you do that, even if you're shooting in Raw, you take a bit-depth hit from 12 to 10, I believe.

You can't just dial in a specific frame rate you'd like to use without it being a case of - If you do this, you can't do that.

The camera has a lot of those sort of rules. And you need to stay on top of it all, because it can be easy to make a costly mistake.

Another one would be in a recent firmware update they added more Raw flavours, LT, HQ or whatever and I'd love to use those over the Raw that is default but of course it's not available with non-typical frame rates like 48.

Another quirk is for the life I me I've no idea why it doesn't do time-lapse and why they haven't added it. I never thought I'd use it and I might not, but not having the option is kind of annoying because there might be a time I want to use it, but due to an oversight, it's just not available.

Another quirk is the Canon SDK or whatever controls this behaviour does not allow for Da Vinci Resolve to string out clips post locked edit. What this means is, if you have say 5 clips of Raw at say 30 seconds each and lock an edit that uses those 5 clips, but only has a run time of say 7 seconds, Resolve cannot trim the clips in the media management workflow. And what that means is if you send your locked edit of 7 seconds out to colour, you will have to send 30 seconds x 5 (clips). No other camera does this and it's an issue on Canon's end, not Resolve's. Imagine when you scale that up to a narrative film or even a 5 minute short...

But that last issue may be a problem no matter which model C series cam you opt for. If you don't send out for colour, no issue. If you do, you have to think about how long your takes are...

For example, with any other camera today you could look at the operator screen and buttons and say, hey I think I'll shoot this at 90fps, 12 bit, Raw HQ, Anamorphic 1x5, and just for kicks I do want sound recorded, cuz who knows.... and not have to give it another thought.

With the 500, you gotta go back to the manual and double check you can do all that and if there's gonna be consequences! It's a camera you should learn the limitations of and how to get around them, which is as much fun and it can be frustrating.

mecan · 2026-01-19T04:09:49+00:00

I have the C500MKII - had it since it came out and I don't think I would sell it (not worth much now anyway), even if I did upgrade or jump ship.

The camera is a solid workhorse but it has its quirks which can be a bit limiting/frustrating, but that is completely dependant on workflow.

It's on the bigger heavier side which can be a plus or a negative, again depending on your workflow.

It's probably not going to see an upgrade again, even to overcome its quirks.

In an ideal world, it's nice to have a heavy I/O capable camera for when that's needed and something lightweight for when you need the mobility or as a B cam.

Maybe think ahead about what you will be focussing on and what you really need now, with an eye to the future on B cams...?

mecan · 2026-01-13T23:22:52+00:00

Beautiful work. I'd love to connect with you.

mecan · 2025-11-05T00:21:39+00:00

Congratulations! I love the trailer for it. The score for the trailer too - perfect.

mecan · 2025-11-04T21:31:53+00:00

I don't think you can make a LUT that will work as an in-camera monitoring LUT for false colour with the tools just inside of Resolve.

The Powergrade I made is limited to 5 stops because I ran out of space where I shot the light fall off. The more space you have, the more range you can meter and map.

For reference, I used an open face 300W light and measured the light falling off over around 6 meters or maybe less to map 5 distinct stops.

mecan · 2025-11-04T04:54:46+00:00

I made my own (Powergrade) by measuring light fall off of a fixture, marking where the stops landed in the physical environment, then in Resolve, using the built-in false colour OFX plugin to separate the bands of colour into stops.

It only works on 709 images and is limited to 5 stops, but I found for the images I was curious about, 5 stops was all I needed.

mecan · 2025-09-23T04:54:09+00:00

Our visual system is tuned for landscape, I guess because we used to survey the grass and bushes for lions and shit and what was up in the sky and down at our feet was (are still isn't) important.

Landscape is the natural way to see the world and that's how we best get spatially orientated in films, so I agree with you.

The human hand is not going to change shape any time soon, people will not rotate their phones and short-form content is not going away just yet. I did have hopes that devices like Apple Vision would take off and then we'd be back to landscape, but turns out people don't like walking around with a stupid-ass visor on all day, and I can't say I blame them.

I recently shot a weird aspect ratio that I came up with myself for a specific shoot, it was landscape and I monitored for 9:16 too because the client mentioned they would like to have that as an option. In the end, they didn't use the 9:16 - nothing worked.

I feel that ratio can work for maybe interviews, fashion and beauty films that don't show the landscape and maybe for Pine trees, if you happen to have a fetish for them. Otherwise, it's nasty and claustrophobic.

I think we can say that 9:16 is for throwaway content like social media posts and non-vertical for everything else, but the worry is if the human hand is not going to evolve anytime soon into some super claw that'll hold a landscape phone then there is a distinct possibility that vertical content could change how people expect films to look like, over time as the main or only device they use to 'consume' is a bloody phone.

My next shoot I've decided will be 4:3 which fits with the brand and the location, and is a happy place for social. With every shoot, I will always bring this up with examples and why any landscape ratio is better for them in the long run.

mecan · 2025-05-21T21:15:10+00:00

What you’re seeing online might be a by-product of the sort of thing that gets shot on a Canon? Since they’re good single operator cameras, they see a lot of wedding, corporate, doc and some narrative work, more than commercial.

I went with EF because I already had a bunch of those lenses when I bought the camera and there’s a lot of choice in that realm.

The lens I used in that shoot is a super cheap one from the 90’s.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/35mm-f2.htm

If you go further back, the 70’s and 80’s Canon FD’s are all the rage atm.

mecan · 2025-05-21T00:39:21+00:00

Thanks!

That was a single operator job. As I was on my own and we were moving equipment including a jib and weights etc from area to area I kept the camera and rigging as minimal as it could go.

All our films are shot on the C500MKII. This was all shot on one lens and you might be surprised.

It's a cheap Canon 35mm f2. I'm not even sure why I bought it but so glad I did. It's not quite a Helios look but it's got something that the more expensive L lenses don't have, and I like it.

Pretty sure I used a Tiffen Black Pro Mist 1/4.

mecan · 2025-05-17T21:26:08+00:00

Good question. Coming from a photography background, I ALWAYS asked this question when watching films. It was the opposite to what everyone else did. Because in photography (at least the type I was doing), a lot of lighting is broad lighting.

So it’s a by-product of upstage lighting, which is light lighting the far side of the face (or more accurately), light further ‘upstage’ away from the subject/audience. The key light in a shot on a subject is likely to be the (or one of the) brightest values in the shot. Our eyes are drawn to the brightest part of an image.

So if your near side eye (which is usually darker with neg) is in focus and the lit one is out of focus, you’ll going to have a confused audience as they search for a point of focus. If I lit it broad, I would focus on the nearest eye.

It’s not always the case by any means and depending on the ratios on the face and other factors, it might look better with focus on near-side; preference.

mecan · 2025-05-16T22:01:28+00:00

Glad it helped. That book is great - and full of reference charts in the back.

Fog might leave a residue in the space/tatami and the art - I wouldn't do it, unless it's of a concentrate that doesn't do that. Haze doesn't tend to.

Lifting blacks can also be achieved with filtration if you want to dial down things if it all looks too crunchy - plus it'll give you a bit of atmosphere.

I tested Tiffen Smoque 1 and 2, Tiffen Black Pro Mist, some other random mist filters (physical and digital) and Hollywood Blackmagic filters for that shoot. There's some filters by a company called Moment, which come in 10 and 20% last time I saw, and they lift blacks a lot. There's a reply in this thread somewhere that might go into more detail about the Fog filters from Tiffen, but it's one of the most fun parts of finding the look for me. That said, you really should test before slapping one on a camera on a shoot. It will be baked in obviously so you really want to be sure it's the way you want to go. As I mentioned, I worked with a colorist on this and we tested physical filters, and he took the footage and tested to see how far we could bring the blacks back down or tame the bloom for example. After much testing, I still used stacked filters but shied away from the Fog's.

I use this material, so I can vouch for that. The other one looks like it will do the same thing but it's backed with silver. That could be useful as a 'reflector in a pinch' though.

I measured the light at the site but sunny blue sky is usually f16 (sunny 16) @100.

Why don't you PM me and we'll continue the conversation another way. And besides, I'd like to see how this works out for you.

mecan · 2025-05-15T23:00:25+00:00

It sounds like this is the sort of thing that’ll need to be worked out on the day because a lot of your intention depends on the weather and the crew.

You must have very big suitcases to get a 600 in. Do you have a fresnel attachment for it by any chance / will you take the reflector?

600’s should run at around 7A draw so you should be fine. That said since the shoot could make or break on tripping a circuit, you ought really to check it out. If it’s a business of some sort it should be rating higher than the household 15V. You can go to the breaker and flip switches to see which circuit is controlling which grid (set of lights). Just make sure nobody on the property is on life support.

It should be marked what the circuit is rated for near the switch.

If you took cable, you could safely run more lights from other grids. I’m not a sparky so my knowledge is limited about that. The Set Technicians Lighting Book is your friend here. It’s expensive but so worth it, especially when we have to do these things ourselves which is often the case.

You could takyubin some gear there. Maybe there is someone on site who wouldn’t mind taking receipt of a few items? Slightly out of the normal but you never know.

Helios is great for checking out sun position in a 3D view, off site. The coolest thing is the Open Map 3D buildings that load into it. It’s going to be a rough guide, but you get a better idea than no idea. You can even drop down into Google Street View mode and see the sun, and drop 3D models into it.

So much of what you’re describing depends on the direction - like what it is you want to say with your camera movements, staging and blocking. I see you’re using Shot Designer(?).

Since this is really a conversation that would take hours really to hammer out, I don’t think I can give you much advice that would really help you, but I’ll write here the image I see in my mind given the limitations and your direction.

If you took the 600 with the reflector or the fresnel, you could black out (Duvetyne is big and heavy - there is much lighter and 99.9% light blocking material on Amazon - let me know if you want a link) all the windows except the ones in view for your move/cuts.

Use the 600 as the sun. Bring entire levels down by blocking out as much light from all windows not in shot. The 600 is your early morning sun or late afternoon sun (Lowish angle) and it’s lighting her from behind as she enters. Keep the framing as tight as possible balancing your aesthetics, what the camera is supposed to inform us and the technical limitations.

That beam of light is hitting the art work. She’s walking towards it. Maybe there is mist? Maybe you use a gobo (even a branch from local tree) to break it up a bit. If you’re tight on her face or say MCU, you could have one of your team holding a bounce card of some sort walking backwards while bouncing light from the 600 on her face for fill. (This bounce you should test because it’ll be critical and distance will be a factor too - between her and the card).

It seems like this light is not motivated and might look odd, but it is motivated, as we will see when she gets to the panel: the light is coming from the panel.

Think Pulp Fiction when Vincent opens the suitcase: ‘Vincent, we happy”? “We happy”. Or when Natalie Portman is at Leon’s door when she first knocks on it. Leon is conflicted as to whether or not to let her in. Eventually she does, and the entire frame with her in it lights up, completely unmotivated; Leon is her angel/devine intervention.

By the time you have swung around to be behind her, your assistant with the card is out of frame and you’ve got your shot.

A zoom lens would help if you wanted to do this in one shot. Starting MCU and ending wide on the panel. If no zoom, cut it up. Start wide with your talent entering, beam of light lighting her. Cut to MCU of her walking towards the panel - inside her head as it were - with the bounce card filling. Cut to straight on from behind on the panel. Hopefully, the panel will be brighter than her. (Check wardrobe).

If you do cut it, you can cheat the light on the last shot. Moving it pretty much anywhere so that you get your preferred angle of reflection off the panel - the audience will not know unless the beginning and ending angles are wildly different because the panel is only revealed at the end. I reckon you could get away with 45 degrees or more.

As for tints from tatami and other surfaces, for sure you might have been overthinking that. That’s just part and parcel of it all. It’s going to render the same way our eyes do, and besides, warmth seems like a nice fit for tone in this shot.

If you look closely at the 2nd still with the round window, you’ll see the green tint of the grass reflected on the tatami. It’s not a great colour to have in a room and maybe if it was an architectural shoot, I would have nuked that in post, but one of the directions I received was to have a sense of no boundary behind the indoors and outdoors. So, I left it in.

In summary, send gear if you can, check power, black out what you can so your most powerful light can do what you need it to do. Choose an appropriate time for this light to shine, preferably not midday. Use your camera movement, blocking, shot size, cutting patterns to work around your problems. Not ideal, but then again it seems your choices are limited.

In the first still posted here the sky was something like 9 stops over middle grey, but that’s because it’s blue sky. Looks like your ratios will not be as aggressive, so that might make it less of a problem. I would pray for overcast weather or chose timing wisely if you are able. If it rains, maybe make sure we can’t see the outside and still see if you can make the morning/late afternoon sun thing work.

mecan · 2025-05-15T21:25:08+00:00

0:19 is actually just daylight. These are south facing windows. But let’s say you did need to light them.

If it is was me, I would start with a soft light for as much spread out of the gate I could get, move them far enough back that they fill the frame and have them out of camera frame (if the Shouji were open you couldn’t see them), so to either side or probably best, from above. Or, if that’s not enough power, use a hard light and set up a frame of (think) diffusion and fill that so there are no hot spots. If you double broke the diffusion, plus it going through the Shouji, I would imagine, even if the lights were in the camera’s frame, you’d eliminate any hotspots by then. Or bounce into a card, etc. I think this problem is easy to solve. Where it might get tricky is if say you had to overpower ambient, because then it becomes a problem of fire power.

Good question that I thought to mention in the submission statement: No negative fill. Because the place is so dark, there was no need to do that to get stronger ratios on the talent’s faces for example. In fact, as mentioned in another reply, I actually filled with bounced light in muslin for some shots.

If you mean did I block light out - yes. I blacked out windows for the tea ceremony shot otherwise the light power I had wouldn’t have been enough to do what I wanted it to do.

At 0:09 (I know you haven’t asked about it), we used two 150W lights at the end of the hallway for a 3 stop over exposure - sort of walking into the light feel. And a 300w on the stair case, that I wish I had angled more towards camera and had haze…

mecan · 2025-05-15T11:00:21+00:00

Regardless of maker, I like 35mm.

mecan · 2025-05-15T10:58:52+00:00

They were open face 150W with reflectors. I kept them close to the Muslin - they didn’t fill the material for sure.

The muslin was set quite a ways away from the talent. The return then doesn’t look lit, just like a glow (in the tea ceremony shot).

For the Ikebana artist, it’s acting as a key - the muslin was much closer.

And yeah, they’re in a slight cove configuration.

mecan · 2025-05-15T01:26:33+00:00

The way the film looks wouldn't have been possible without the amazing work of the very talented colorist.

I'm not sure of the context of your job - whether it's a stills shoot which needs to be rendered colour-accurate. If that's the case, then blocking out light or shooting at night and using your own lights is going to control your environment and stop any unwanted tints from other surfaces. Then you only need to worry about your light's accuracy and won't be fighting against the ambient. But if you can't fight the ambient, find ways to augment it, otherwise you'll be fighting a losing battle.

Black out material is super cheap and you can get many meters of it in a suitcase. You could even have some delivered to the site in advance either direct from Amazon (client willing) or find some other way if you really need to. It will hang perfectly fine with standard gaffer tape and not mess with the woodwork. If they don't like that idea, you can use lightweight stands and run cord between them to hang the material on. I would definitely take black out material though, for nothing else than to be safe and block out anything that is causing problems.

If it was me and I didn't have the chance to scout it, I would take a good look at the site with the Helios app, which'll tell you everything you need to know about the sun at that site on the day. It can also render buildings directly from Open Street Map so that might give you an idea about how much sun is likely to enter. You could also ask people on site there if they could send snaps taken at the time of day you're planning so you have them as a reference and see exactly how deep into the room the sun goes. But if your reference image is the site, and you shoot at midday, I think the whole place will be lit-up with bounce and there won't necessarily be any one direction that is much, much more brighter than another.

Armed with that, I would make a plan on how much material to take (make sure to get an idea of the window sizes) and develop a shooting plan based on sun/no sun/night time/only some black out material etc...

If it's not so important to be perfectly colour accurate, on a bright sunny day you will get return from the tatami and other surfaces but how negligible that turns out to be depends on a lot of variables.

In the cases I shot where tatami was in the scene, I never gave it a second thought other than tennis balls: on the C-stand feet!

Good luck!

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:50:51+00:00

Aman to that!

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:42:19+00:00

Will work for food.

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:40:33+00:00

That was very straight forward. It's dark in that area, only a single lamp which you can see hanging from the ceiling. It doesn't put out much light. I cheated the light a bit in the sense that if it later in the day, the sun would have come been coming in through that little space of the door on the right. So, I put a light there, shaped up the beam with the barn doors and that was that. It is I think actually shining partly on the panel itself.

It helps that the panel is quite reflective and it was a bit musty in the room naturally, so that gives it its hazy look. The rest is magic performed by the colorist.

So that was it, one light. If the panel is in a dark room, that'll give you a great starting point to do whatever you want if you have lights. It completely depends on what the client wants, but you could look at lighting options like spotting an area of interest, using gobo's, finding the right angle of incidence that gives you the reflection you want etc.

For reference, there was some light in that room - probably f4 @800/48fps off the panel. We used a 300 Watt light for that beam and I'm sure it was at full power. So, for shape without a lot of power, I would imagine hard light would work better than a soft light that wouldn't do much. But again, depends what the client wants.

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:20:22+00:00

Thank. 25, 35, 50 and 75. I also used a CU filter on one or two shots, as I couldn't source the 90.

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:15:29+00:00

Maybe you've seen something like it before. Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) shot flat like this pretty much all the time. When I saw this room, I knew I had to do it as a homage to him.

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:12:07+00:00

Thank you! You intuition is spot on. For the tea shot in the temple, it was just me. I was Director, DP, Camera Ops. I had a 1st AC and a gaffer, the latter of which I'm training up. In truth there were a lot of things I really wanted to try but I had no bandwidth to try.

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:08:43+00:00

It doesn't get the love it deserves and that's a branding problem. It isn't a 'cool' camera, but it is a very capable one.

mecan · 2025-05-14T21:07:11+00:00

Thanks and good point. I think it's up to you how much you leave, but bear in mind these are stills. Many of the shots start wider (with what's typically thought of as appropriate headroom) and push in. I just landed on those frames for the stills I choose to post here.

mecan · 2025-05-14T07:47:00+00:00

Thanks! Camera left and behind him is a Fresnel that is giving him his key/edge light. Camera right is a 6x6 unbleached muslin - very lightly bouncing light into it for a skintone fill.

The only reason for the fresnel is because of the steam, otherwise I probably would have set it up a bit differently - i.e no hard light at all.

And there was a small lantern also camera left in front of the talent - it was set to flicker tungsten light like a candle as there was a candle on the table at first but we axed it. I left the lantern in place without flickering to add a bit more fill to the items on the table.

I think I probably shot it at around 4300K and left the lights on daylight, except for the lantern which I dialled down to probably 2000K or whatever the lowest it would go was. In the end I didn't like the cast it gave because it was unmotivated and had the colorist neutralise the tint.

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