Head of Cinema EOS talkd 5D MKii, Magic Lantern and Dual Pixel capabilities.

[jgharding]

 

Some interesting parts are how "5D MKii was an accident for Canon"

 

How the dual-pixel AF was hidden in the C-series cameras, and it's just firmware activation.

 

He does mention "we have to compress raw for a CF card", so perhaps they will have raw video in an SLR body at some point. It'd be good if so, though I'm not so sure it'll happen any time soon...

[Andrew Reid]

Looks like he's just played a round of golf :)

[Damphousse]

Very interesting video.

 

They started thinking about the Cinema line of cameras even prior to getting feedback from the 5D MK II (3:40).  So they didn't look at twitter, forums, blogs, customer feedback, etc.  They saw the 5D MK II prior to launch and said we have to make the C300.  That's pretty innovative. Strangely though they say the Cinema lenses were being designed not for the Cinema cameras but for hte 5D MK II(5:30).  So they were being designed prior to the Cinema line of cameras.  He says EF mount guys started working on those because of "requests."  I wonder who made the requests if the 5D MK II hadn't launched yet?  Anyone else find the chronology puzzling?

 

It's also interesting that they had 150 people working on the Cinema line of cameras.  That's a pretty large crew and it shows.  Those cameras are tight.  I guess that's what it takes to avoid the beta issues of Black Magic cameras.  It also means you can't pull something like that off casually.  The guy speaking is from the video division.  They didn't build this line of cameras using just stills people.

 

 

The lack of raw in cheaper cameras made sense... and it didn't.  At first it just sounded like BS but when the reviewer asked about throughput the guy latched onto that and seemed to indicate that as faster compact media became avaliable you would be more likely to see raw in lower end cameras.

 

In a way it is in line with other things he said.  When asked why the new autofocus firmware was made available for the C100 and not the c300 he said the C100 had less features so it was easy to add the dual AF on, because the processor had less stuff to do at baseline.  So if they are making these types of horse power decisions in the Cinema line imagine the horse power decisions being made in the Rebel line.

[mtheory]

Unfortunately, no matter how much extra quality they can squeeze out their cameras, it will be the marketing people overriding this guy to make the final call...

[Damphousse]

Unfortunately, no matter how much extra quality they can squeeze out their cameras, it will be the marketing people overriding this guy to make the final call...

 

True but no one at any company is producing APS-C sensors with no moire/aliasing and outputing raw or 10 bit 4:2:2 to SD or CF without hacks for less than $4000.  Black Magic Production does it for super 35mm but it uses SSDs.  And that is the throughput thing the guy from Canon referenced.  I'm sure canon will try and protect its professional Cinema cameras but someone without anything to lose would have done it by now if it was that easy.

 

I buy quality lenses and cheap Rebel bodies.  So I can sell my rebel easily and probably only take a $50 hit from the purchase price and get something else if someone comes up with something better comes along.

[Germy1979]

They need a codec. Something like Prores, or anything not 8-bit... Lol. Maybe they'll hop on H.265, or since the C100 uses Avchd, they'll use Avc Ultra? Who knows.