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Canon C200 422 10-Bit Workflow


Samuel Berger

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Mr. Wu addresses the common concern regarding the lack of a "Middle Codec" for the C200.

 

I have to admit I laughed when he explained the workflow. It wasn't quite what I was expecting.

 

But once again, the C200 proves to be the perfect cinema camera and the best camera to buy in 2018, overall.

 

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Yea no... lol few problems. One... CFAST cards are expensive, very very very expensive. So you'll be needing A LOT MORE storage then if you shot 10 bit 4:2:2 Pro Res natively.

 

Two! As Adrian says, copy the media off the cards is critical. The cards just don't work well in that situation and if something happened, you may lose all your data. Plus, you'd be stuck grading the converts not the camera originals. I always keep camera originals, it's critical.

 

THREE... Taking Canon RAW and transcoding it to Pro Res 4:2:2 for editing (or another codec) is extremely time consuming. Remember, Canon RAW doesn't have the hardware support of RED Code or Cinema DNG, both which decode in hardware. Canon RAW does not decode in hardware, it's a software/CPU decoder. So when you use up your cores to decode, you have less cores to process and less cores to compress as Pro Res and DNX both encode using the CPU mostly. So transcoding Red Code and Cinema DNG is pretty fast, but you'd see maybe half of the speed on Canon Raw or any other Raw codec for that matter. Even Arri Raw isn't hardware supported in the same way sadly.

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the main problem would be that you would need to watch all the clips through every time , visually inspecting them from start to end, to ensure there is no encoding problems, before you can delete the original raw files from the cards.

That is just way too time consuming if you need to shoot anything serious where you need to circulate cards even daily and shoot more than very tiny amounts of material.

 

Encoding time would be another issue of course but the real issue would be the amount of manual QC work every time you want to shoot something with the 10bit workflow.

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encoding directly from the camera card would not be that bad if there is no heating/card reader/etc issues. there is slightly bigger risk of file system damage but if one absolutely does not want to back up the original raws to anywhere then there is no other options I think ;)

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probably you would not lose ALL your data, that is very rare unless the card is very seriously physically damaged or one intentionally wipes it by overwriting the files multiple times. Little file system / partition table damage can be repaired with a recovery program most of the time, you might lose SOME data but not ALL of it and you may recover all of it in best case

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I don't see the whole point of even remotely risking it; back it up first, a hard-drive is CHEAP, then do whatever you want ONCE YOU HAVE IT BACKED UP.

What I would do would be back up to 2x drives and then use one of them to write to a 3rd drive in 10 or 8 or whatever bit you want for your proxies.

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I don't see the whole point of even remotely risking it; back it up first, a hard-drive is CHEAP, then do whatever you want ONCE YOU HAVE IT BACKED UP.

What I would do would be back up to 2x drives and then use one of them to write to a 3rd drive in 10 or 8 or whatever bit you want for your proxies.

 

Yeah but then Mr. Wu wouldn't have a video to post on Friday.

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You could use for example the following workflow for the material which leaves you one copy of the raw and one or two copies of the 422:

 

1. Copy the raw material to one normal hdd, preferably using checksum verification. This will be your only final raw backup copy.

2. Make a temporary copy of the raw material to a ssd drive or fast raid.

3.if both copies are ok, format and reuse the camera card.

4.when you have time, do the raw conversion and necessary grading with the temporary ssd/raid copy and then render to 10bit to the edit drive which can also be used as a backup. Visually inspect the output.

5. If the 10bit is ok, you can remove the temporary ssd/raid copy and reuse the drive for other material.

6.it is best to have the 422 version backed up to the raw bu drive also. Then you will have one copy of the raw and two copies of the 10bit rends which should be enough for smaller projects. You are also able to circulate the cards much faster because you don't need to visually inspect the material in the middle of the shoot, you can do that later when you really have time for it

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  • 11 months later...

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