And comparing and matching with Canon C500mkii

After shooting with the Canon C400 for more than a year, mostly in XF-AVC, I hadn’t really noticed noise to be much of an issue. But recently I’ve been shooting raw a lot more often, and I’ve been surprised by the amount of noise, really ugly noise, that leaps out from the shadows when exposing “correctly” even at ISO 800.

This tends to show up, for example, in an interview shot where someone is wearing a dark outfit. Everything looks great except the dark outfit is bristling with noise on closer inspection. This can be tamed in post by adding some de-noising, but it’s not a real solution and denoising in post always slows things down.

I did some testing and it turns out that a genuine fix is obtained by overexposing everything two stops. The best way to think of this is to set the camera at 3200 native iso, and think of it as being set to 800. To be able to work with the image in the monitor, I created a +2-stop compensation LUT to make it appear normal, and boom, problem solved. (Download link below).

At the camera’s native 3200 setting, the shadows are very clean when the raw footage is overexposed 2 stops. Even at 128000, while there is now some noise present in the shadows, it’s still very usable and organic. But 3200 is definitely the sweet spot here for shooting raw on the C400.

By way of comparison, I ran the same test on my C500mkii. This camera has just one base iso of 800, so if it needs overexposure compensation it will be more of an issue in low-light situations than the C400 with its higher triple-base ISO rating options.

Result: The shadows are about half as noisy, but it’s a finer less ugly noise than the C400. The C500mkii needs +1 exposure comp to clean up the shadows in a roughly equivalent way to the C400 with its +2 stop requirement.

So there you have it. To get clean raw footage and match these cameras when shooting raw, I now use a +1 exposure compensation LUT with the C500mkii, and +2 with the C400. When I bring the footage into Resolve, the first thing I do after setting up a color-managed workflow is to bring down the footage on each camera using the HDR global level control, which displays real f-stop values, -2 on the C400 and -1 on C500mkii. And away we go, sharp and clean.

Download my exposure compensation LUTs for C500mkii and C400. Note these both use the Canon Monitor Transform (CMT) version of the Canon LUT which is best for on-set viewing while shooting Clog-2.