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Category: Canon Cinema EOS

30 July 2015

Canon ME20F-SH: 4 Million ISO in a Cube!

Written by Paul Moon

A couple of years ago, Canon teased an ultra-low-light sensor that could capture 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second, as seen in the video clip above. What we didn’t see coming is this kind of hybrid response by Canon to the ARRI Alexa Mini, and the Sony a7S, in their new ME20F-SH that is due to arrive in December at $30k. A specialty video shooter, it feels like an industrial tool for surveillance, but Canon hints that it could be used for film and television production in extraordinary low-light conditions: this thing can capture video with less than 0.0005 lux of illumination, which equates to an ISO sensitivity of about 4 million!

There’s no viewfinder or display on the device at all: you would need to hook up an external monitor for digging through menus, and seeing what you’re shooting. It doesn’t record anything. Endless commentary is already underway with this breaking news, but here are some further quirks to ponder:

  • Canon has introduced something called EF-mount with Cinema Lock, and it’s the mount itself that rotates to lock the lens in. It would be great to see this on the entire Cinema EOS product line.
  • Canon is vague about the color characteristics of this product, not specifically citing C-Log or its variants, but assuring that it’s “Canon Log and Wide Dynamic Range.” This nonchalance plays along with the industry-wide problem confronting an increased sophistication by filmmakers who demand flat color profiles, but find no standards (and frequent version changes). Which C-Log and S-Log versions are we on now? Where is V-Log?
  • “Exposure and white balance are automatic”: really?
  • What’s that round multi-pin interface on the front? It’s labeled “LENS.”
  • There’s not enough room in/on the chassis for a battery, and it requires external DC power.
  • The “MIC” input is just an unbalanced 1/8″ jack. Seriously?
  • It has a built-in ND filter. It doesn’t do 4K.
  • In reality, this 4 Million ISO Cube is not nearly a threat to that other cube, the ARRI Alexa Mini, which was designed for mounting in tight spaces like stunt work, drones, and B-camera roll to match the mothership. It’s also not nearly a threat to the a7 line of video shooters as they evolve, which are fully-featured shooters with (mostly) everything integrated.

    Even if you can’t quite put your finger on it, Canon at least has dropped a midnight surprise defying that big complaint by the filmmaker community: they never take risks. This thing came out of nowhere, and it’s punk rock. Way to go!

    Here are the specs, straight from Canon’s press release:
    ME20F-SH Specs

    July 30, 2015 Canon Cinema EOS, FocusPulling Original 1 Comment
    27 March 2015

    The Salt of the Earth

    Written by Paul Moon

    With The Salt of the Earth heading into general release today, it’s a nice occasion to consider how you can combine still photography and documentary cinematography, and overall the genre of artist portraits. It’s also an interesting example of how collaboration can result in a great work of art, co-existing with epic creative conflict.

    WimBy now in his career, the name Wim Wenders is a high-culture brand name to patrons of modern art who want, anywhere-and-always, to be in the know. Frighteningly (for those of us who make documentary films in particular), his first major documentary Pina — just before this one — got widely awarded that grand critic’s moniker of “reinventing the genre.” In reality, besides shooting in 3D, he tried a few other tricks like asking interviewees to look into their laps while we hear their voices before and after those moments — an experiment pre-dating Wenders, with many finding its narrative value limited (and in Pina, those interviews really just flatter the subject of the film in gross repetition). Be that as it may, what’s really interesting about his latest film is that it isn’t just his. The legendary photographer’s son, Juliano Salgado, was already making a documentary. Wenders arrived in the middle, bringing his brand name, and all hell broke loose.

    I attended a special screening at MoMA last month where the co-directors discussed their film afterward. In the Germanic voice for which he’s known (think Werner Herzog’s famous droll, but even slower), Wenders dropped an anecdote that at one point in the editing process, he got a hairline away from committing physical violence against his co-director when things got especially tense. Not disagreeing, Juliano Salgado related how the film was a personal journey of reconciliation with his famous father who was mostly absent from his childhood. (After Wenders awkwardly quipped that it’s a great master plan, to make a documentary about family dysfunction just to repair it, he spent the rest of the evening retracting his comment with sullen regret.)

    2015-03-07 21.52.59-1

    Not merely dealing in gossip here, what evolves is how the documentary medium is in itself oddly less collaborative than narrative cinema, under normal circumstances. Around that, The Salt of Earth had mashed up its auteuring and stylistic approaches beneath the inevitable locus of the film, those breathtaking photographs of Sebastião Salgado. (The only way to do them justice is to see them yourself, as best you can.) Although there are beautiful time-based images in the documentary (shot mostly on a Canon Cinema EOS C300), the photographs are the thing. That sneering terminology “Ken Burns effect” is sadly part of our critical vernacular these days, but in this film, you get something between that, and the pervasive milieu today of observational/direct cinema: Salgado’s photos get presented static, not zooming or panning, simply to speak for themselves. Thus, the sophomore Wenders documentary fails to “re-invent” genre once again, because the integrity of the subject prevented it. A good thing.

    That’s nothing to say of process. Rather like Errol Morris’ famous Interrotron, Wenders filmed his interviews through the scrim of a teleprompter that projected into the eyes of its subject, Salgado himself, the photograph he was asked to talk about. Even just conceptually, that’s clever.

    Roger Ebert famously wrote of Godfrey Reggio’s revolutionary Koyaanisqatsi (always my favorite film until Terrence Malick got back to making them) that the beauty of Ron Fricke’s cinematography oddly betrayed the philosophical cautions in those Hopi prophecies of “life out of balance.” Here, too, the audience is invited to a peculiar quandary, to admire and absorb Salgado’s immaculate perfection as an artist, with photographs that portray the worst of our world like genocide and famine. In that moment, whenever it may arrive for each viewer, a spark can ignite: to separate artistic accomplishment from documentation — obeisant to judgment upon discrete yet parallel courses. I could think of no better way to see the world!

    The film opens today in New York and Los Angeles; click here for its wider release schedule in the United States.

    March 27, 2015 Canon Cinema EOS, DOCOFILM, FocusPulling Original documentary, errol morris, godfrey reggio, interrotron, juliano salgado, koyaanisqatsi, photography, ron fricke, sebastião salgado, terrence malick, wim wenders Leave a Comment
    01 January 2010

    All About the Camera User Groups: Tag Your Clip, Check the Box

    Written by Paul Moon
    January 1, 2010 ARRI Alexa and Amira, Blackmagic Cinema Cameras, Camera User Groups, Canon Cinema EOS, Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EOS 70D, Canon EOS Rebel/70D/80D, FocusPulling Original Video, Panasonic GH3, Panasonic GH4, Sony a7S, Sony CineAlta F3/F5/F55, Sony NEX-FS100, Sony NEX-FS700, Sony NEX-VG10/VG20/VG30, Sony PXW-FS7 6 Comments
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