Side by side frames

 

I finally had a chance this morning to take a look at the clean hdmi output of the Canon 5d mark III and compare it to the internal codec. At 200% there isn’t really a big difference in image quality. There does seem to be a little bit of color shift in the ninja footage but it’s not extreme and probably won’t be an issue for most people. The Prores recorded by the Ninja 2 will provide more headroom when grading but the footage itself isn’t much sharper than the internal codec.

You can download the frame grabs here and take a look at them for yourself. If you were planning on picking up a Ninja 2 to improve the sharpness of your Canon 5d mark III footage, you’re probably going to be disappointed. If you plan to heavily grade your footage in post, the Ninja 2 could still be a reasonable option.

The disappointing part for me is that the HDMI signal doesn’t contain audio.  I haven’t had many issues with the detail in the images provided by the 5dmkIII, but it would have been really handy to capture 4 tracks of audio with the ninja and have them all conveniently rolled into the a single clip. I generally try to avoid syncing audio unless it’s absolutely necessary and the more tracks I can bring in the better.

I can see some use cases, for example if you shoot a lot of legal work, having a Ninja with you could allow you to record extremely long sessions. It might also be a benefit when green screening. I’ll post some more screen grabs once I’ve had a little more time to test, but as of right now it doesn’t look like a Ninja 2/5d mark III combo will be worth the cost for many.

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