24Jan Canon 6d on Sale for $1350 new
Quick heads up Ebay seller 6ave has the Canon 6d body on sale for $1350 new with free shipping. If you are in the market for a full frame camera that’s a pretty darn good price. Supplies are limited so if you want one, you better move fast.
23Jan Used Gear Watch: DSLR shoulder rig with lots of extra parts
This looks to be one of the old Zacuto style rigs that used to pop up on ebay. The setup seems to have enough parts to build pretty much any kind of formfactor you’d want. Currently it’s at $100 with a $300 buy it now price with free shipping. The two QR plates are worth around $50 a peace, make the rig (or double rig in this case) $200. Could be a pretty good deal if you’re in the market for a new camera rig.
23Jan Cold shoe to thumb screw 1/4 20 rig mount – hands on
That little $9 adapter I posted last week, showed up and although the label on Amazon is a little strange
Cold Shoe Mount Male ¼ to 20 Female Threaded Adapter
the adapter itself is as pictured.
The cold shoe and thumbscrew are both metal and the case itself is a molded piece of plastic. Feels reasonably solid in the hand. I wouldn’t put a 4 or 5 pound weight on this thing, but it’s more than strong enough to hold a microphone or field monitor in place. If you are a BMPCC owner or you have a rig with lots of 1/4 20 threads this cold shoe to thumb screw adapter is a pretty handy item to have.
I actually ended up mounting one of these permanently on the back of the Canon c100. That option gives me two places to mount wireless mics next to the cameras audio inputs. Although the c100 hasn’t impressed me visually the audio quality and interface is top notch. Any way if you’re interested in one of these adapters you can find them here. They seem to keep drifting in and out of stock on Amazon, i’m guessing the seller is ordering in bulk from somewhere else. Maybe I can hunt down the source and get them for a little cheaper.
22Jan DSLR FILM NOOB Quick tip of the day – Video out via Canon USB cable
There are always a lot of questions about hooking up a Canon DSLR to a standard definition monitor. The special cable you need normally comes with new cameras, but a lot of people either lose it or buy used and don’t get the cable. If you don’t have it, the cable is called a AVC-DC400ST cable and you can find it here for about $10. Make sure the cable has a red, white, and yellow RCA leads, some of the cables for sale are miss labeled and are actually AVC-DC400 cables which don’t output stereo audio.
If you’d like to find out more about hacking the cable for headphone monitoring applications check out this earlier post. You can also use this method if you aren’t good with a soldering iron. Or for around $20 you can get a cable that’s already made and ready to go.
21Jan Canon EOS-M down to $234
If you are in the market for a really low price camera, second camera, or danger cam for filming, the EOS-M body is now down to $234 on ebay and $237 on amazon. The EOS-M can be adapted to just about any lens including old FD lenses like the Canon FD 35-105mm f3.5 and the Canon FD 55mm f1.2. It has the same sensor as the t2i through t5i and you can even get Magic Lantern working on it.
I used to recommend a used Canon t2i for beginning filmmakers, but with the ultra low prices of the EOS-M and the better compatibility with cheap FD lenses, the EOS-M is now my number 1 recommendation for filmmakers on a budget. If you want to shoot photography and video, get a t2i, but if you main goal is shoot video only and you’re on a tight budget, get the EOS-M.
21Jan External 4tb drives back under the price of internal drives
Looks like Seagate external drives have dropped below the price of internal drives yet again. You can pick up an external 4tb drive for $159, while the 4tb internal drive is closer to $180. If you’re willing to do a little bit of work removing the drive from the enclosure you can save around $20. The savings won’t make you rich, but every little bit helps. You can find a guide on how to remove the drive here, the whole process takes about 15 minutes and it’s pretty easy to do.
20Jan Canon c100 vs 6d and some c100 noise reduction
I’m stuck without a vehicle today (my trucks getting new tires) and the weathers been pretty rotten with 60 mile an hour gusts, so i’ve spent the morning playing around with the Canon c100 inside. A number of you have offered up suggestions to make my c100 shooting experience more enjoyable. So this morning, I went through the Canon c100’s menus and made a number of changes based on your recommendations, after that I shot this little bit of test footage with the c100 and the Canon 6d.
This isn’t very scientific, I just grabbed the c100 and the 6d, set them to the same kelvin, dialed them up to ISO 3200 at f2.8 and shot this cup of tea. After a little bit I punched in to 200% so you can see the grain. Cinema lock was turned off on the c100 and the 6d was set to standard picture style.
Youtube adds a lot of compression, so here’s a 1080p screen grab to get a better look at the noise. While the c100 might retain more detail in the image, the noise looks worse to my eye when compared to the Canon 6d at 3200 iso. I don’t have any problems shooting with a 6d or 5d mark III at 3200 or even 6400 iso if needed, however the c100’s noise pattern starts to crawl above 3200 and gets really ugly at 6400 iso in the examples below.
With the setting changes made, you can see that the Canon c100 is starting to produce an image that’s a little closer to what I would expect out of my DSLR cameras, though it’s still noisier to my eye. In an effort to clean up the noise, I ran the c100 test footage through Neat Video’s noise reduction plugin, here’s a screen grab, and here’s the same screen grab without the filter applied.
It’s easy to see that the noise filter is doing it’s job, most if not all of the crawling noise is eliminated by Neat Video’s noise reduction plugin. But once you apply the filter, any resolution advantage the c100 has disappears and you’re left with an image that looks about the same as the Canon 6d’s pixel binning method of video capture.
Here’s another example of the noise level of the Canon c100. This was shot at ISO 6400 and you can see that the noise is pretty ugly on the unfiltered shot. Here’s full size screen grabs with the filter and without.
This shot is my own fault and I can’t blame the c100. This was pushed all the way up to 20,000 ISO and that’s asking a lot from the sensor. While the filter does a pretty decent job of covering up this poor settings choice, you can still see that the image is starting to fall apart around the eyes. This wasn’t a critical shot, just something I was playing around with while the actors worked on their lines. I don’t think I’d risk going above 12,800 unless I was shooting reality tv or a documentary. Anyway here are the screen grabs with the filter and without.
If you have to apply heavy noise reduction at high ISO what’s the advantage? Are we spending $5,500 for better ergonomics and more pro features? Is that enough to justify an upgrade for you? I know that not everyone needs to shoot at such high ISO’s and if you don’t there are a large number of cameras that will give you excellent full sensor resolution at ISO settings 800 and below for far less than the c100. The big selling point on the c100 for me was lens compatibility, audio controls, resolution, and low light performance.
Noise reduction requirements knock out resolution improvements and the images I’ve captured at high ISO, as you can see above, need some work. At double the price of a 5d mark III, is form factor and ergonomics enough of a benefit for you to upgrade? Seems like a hard sell to me.
20Jan Aputure VS-3 IPS monitor firmware update
Quick update on the Aputure VS-3 IPS monitor. With the new firmware installed you can now see and use the menu system in focus peaking mode. This makes the monitor much easier to use. Before the update the entire menu system was almost impossible to read in focus peaking mode. If you own this monitor, get the firmware update here.
19Jan Samsung 840 EVO 500GB drive $279.99 on sale again
If you missed the last sale here’s another chance. Normally the 500GB version of this drive will set you back around $315, but right now you can pick it up for just $279.99 with free shipping on ebay. This is one of ebay’s one day sales, as i’m typing this there is currently 14 hours left on this sale and they’ve sold more than 130 drives. So if you want one, you should probably act fast.
19Jan Atmos Ninja 2 firmware update
If you are an Atomos Ninja 2 owner, there’s a new firmware version 4.21 out (you can find it here). The update is supposed to improve support for deinterlacing, input color correction, as well as audio meter indication. They’ve also added some audio delay options for the analog audio inputs. I’m still pretty happy with my ninja purchase, though I don’t use it as much as I was expecting. Strangely I’ve ended up using it quite a bit for screen capture applications when demoing on computers that don’t have enough resources to handle Camtasia, it also works pretty well with the Hero 3 black edition.
