 Welcome to the Crimson Engine, my name is Rubidian. Today we are doing the most requested video ever that is a comparison between footage shot on the Arri Alexa Mini and the Canon C200. I shot this in conjunction with Amando at MondoBytes. We're able to get an Alexa Mini from MagRens.com for the week, which was really great. Amando has the companion video on his channel, so check the link in the description. Go check that out. Talks a lot about how we tested at what our setup was. Talks about the kind of usability of both cameras. I'm going to delve more into the technical side, the grading, and also the production side, the cost of these cameras and cost-benefit analysis if you like. Without further ado, let's dive in. So here I am at DaVinci Resolve. I've synced up three clips, this daylight and tungsten interior, both Alexa Mini and C200, then a daytime exterior, and a more colorful, kind of more color-saturated science fiction kind of look. So what I'll do first is just go into my LUTs and add my Log C to Rec.709 to my Arri Alexa. Then I can go across to my C200 and add the same thing. And you can see there's a little bit difference here. You might say, hey, the colors on the Alexa look way, way better. But what I'll do now is just grab this as a still. And now when I go across to my C200, I can turn on my Wipe here and I can see the two of them together. Then what I'll do is I'll go into, say, 200%, and I'll turn up my saturation on my C200. And you can see down here in the waveform, I can just start to match them a little bit more mechanically. And after playing for a while, I can get something that matches almost exactly. So I can even go into 300%. And you see how skin tone is almost perfect match, grain is almost perfect match. And if I still mark this one, I'll label this as my Alexa Rec.709. And then I'll grab this and change this as C200 to Alexa. So now going on to our next clip, if I apply the Rec.709 image to this, to my Alexa image, and apply the C202 Alexa to this, to something close. Now let's go back into our 300%. And you can see there seems to be a lot more purple in the Alexa image outside. So I'll just go to my C200 into my tint. It's just like two or three percent. And again, we have an image now that's matching almost identically. You would be really hard pressed to find a difference between these two images. So then let's go into our more extreme version. Color wise, apply the grade. All right, back to 300% now. You know, this is interesting. More color information in this one. I think I prefer the skin tone of the C200. It's a little bit more polished, a little bit more refined. Colors are both great on both. To be honest, I didn't expect to see a lot of difference between these two images. I've shot with the Canon C200, I've shot with the Arri Alexa. If you're shooting raw, you can compensate for anything in the camera. Now I expected to see similar images. But what we came out with, at least in my opinion, was an almost identical image, at least at proper exposures. And I'll get to that a little bit later about dynamic range, which is where we saw the biggest difference. At a correctly exposed image, you get slightly different colors. But as far as the sharpness of the image, the quality of the image, the maneuverability of the image in post, if I found anything, it's that the C200 is sharp, but noticeably sharp, actually, that's due to the C200's sensor being a lot larger. The Alexa has a 2.7 megapixel sensor that uses some pretty fancy electronics in the body to up-res or upscale that image to 4K. The C200 is shooting native 4K, it has more photosites, it's a more dense sensor, it's a high resolution sensor, and so it gives a high resolution, sharp image. The shot we're going to look at, let's look at with correct exposure and compare them. So I'm going to add my Rec 709 to my Alexa, that looks nice. Then I'm going to cross to my C200, go up and apply my C200 to Alexa, that looks almost identical. You can see here, even at 300%, the C200 is a little sharper, a little bit more detail in the skin because of the bigger sensor, but you know, color-wise, they're good. Take a look, though, this highlight in her, in Alison's blonde hair, it looks like the Alexa is holding just a little more information. It's still clipping, well, it's actually not. You see here on the waveform, neither than my clipping hard, but both of them are sort of losing information in the highlight. So then if we go across to, so our next clip is same shot, but four stops over and C200 four stops and just look at the waveform. I can see here that the Alexa is clipping hard only in her hair, but the C200, oh my goodness, we're going to have a problem. So again, we'll apply the default LUT and then I'll just use my offset to drag down our exposure into what's actually a pretty usable shot. If I turn my swipe on and compare it to the correctly exposed shot, this is Alexa versus Alexa now, not that much different, still pretty usable. Whereas if I go over to my C200 and add my LUT and then try and drag down my exposure, oh my. So you've lost all the detail, we've lost all the detail in her skin, we've lost all the detail in her hair, you can see the waveform, it's clipping really, really hard and to compare that with the original C200, I mean the original Alexa, sorry, this is a usable shot, this is not a usable shot. So when it comes to overexposure latitude, the Alexa really comes into its own. So here we have the Alexa, I haven't labeled these, you have to take my word for it, here's the Alexa four stops under and the C200 four stops under and if I bring this up, you know, there's some noise but it's still pretty usable, I mean I'll bring it up higher. It starts to fall apart when you compress it too much but if you use it as a dark shot, it's fine with the C200. Again, pretty usable but if we go in 300% say this is the Alexa, the noise, noise is actually pretty clean and filmic whereas the C200, you would struggle, you would have to clean this up digitally, there's so much color in the noise, the noise just isn't pleasing or as usable as the Alexa with the C200. Yeah, you can recover this, you can go through and use a de-noiser but with the Alexa, you don't even need to do that, you're pretty safe four stops under. Having said that, I don't know anyone who's planning on overexposing their skin tones by four stops, the only scenario I can think where this would be really helpful is where you have like walk and talks and you have your talent walking in and out of light and shade in one continuous shot, you want to go in and rescue those highlights and those shadows in post-production. Now while that may be more possible with the Alexa than the C200, it's still not a very good idea, risking your entire shot for what may or may not be possible in post-production is generally a bad idea. You want to expose correctly within knowing that you definitely have a stop or two, even three in either direction on both cameras. You really wouldn't want to try and risk four and five stops over on these cameras, hoping that you can rescue it in post. Actually shooting with these cameras, one thing that surprised me was how kind of useless the Alexa eyepiece and screener, they're pretty much too small for critical focus. Even the three inch one on the C200 was a real relief to use as opposed to the EVF. I mean the EVF costs more than the C200, so I was expecting a lot more from it, but the screen on the side of the EVF is okay, I guess. You can at least frame up with it. The EVF has like a low refresh rate, so anytime there's movement in the camera, you get a real strobing effect that's kind of hard to look at for extended period of time. We did in the first day use my TV logic 17 inch video village monitor, which was great, and we were able to get two images simultaneous side by side, and we consistently lost track of which one was which unless we marked them. We had to like wiggle the camera to find out if it was the Alexa or the C200 when we swapped between images. Having not really operated, I've shot projects with the Alexa many before, but I've never really been the operator or the DP, and the Alexa mini is not that many. It's many compared to the other Alexa range like the Amira and the XT. It's a significantly large camera. It's very hard to move by yourself. Once you put the EVF in the base plate and a lens on it, it is kind of huge, really surprising compared to the Canon C200 that I'm used to, and just how maneuverable and light and agile that is as a camera system. So we have a $50,000 camera versus a $6,000 camera in my case, because I have the B. Here's what is hugely different. The Alexa mini is manufactured to a much, much higher standard. The materials are better. We have carbon fiber. All the connectors are better. It's a much more resilient, well made, well finished piece of equipment. Noticeably so. I think this comes from Ari's background in 35 millimeter film cameras versus Canon's background in DSLRs. The C200 does feel like a big DSLR. The Alexa mini does feel like a very expensive piece of hardware. The mini has much better monitoring. It has a more accurate waveform, because the C200 shoots in C log 2, but doesn't monitor in C log 2, only in C log 3. So you have to kind of guess what your exposure is. The mini has false color, a much wider variety of tools to work as a cinema camera. Again, as you'd expect being almost 10 times the price. The Alexa has more inputs and more outputs. You can output RAW in this camera. You can record in a middle ground 10-bit 422, which of course the Canon C200 cannot. So you'd think, you know, really these are cameras that have two similar images, but the mini has benefits for its being more expensive. Well, the C200 has a lot of benefits that the Alexa mini doesn't. It has excellent dual pixel autofocus. It has face tracking autofocus. It has focus assist. When you use cinema C&E primes, it'll tell you how in or out of focus you are, which is a game changer. It has RAW as default, not as a paid upgrade. You can use cheaper, non-Sandisk C-Fast cards in the C200, like the excellent pro-grade digital 512 cards, which you get an hour and something of RAW, 65 minutes of RAW for 600 bucks, as opposed to 12 or $1400 for the Sandisk registered Alexa mini cards. The C200 has its own internal battery system. Sure, they don't last that long, but you can get a 60 watt hour extension battery so that you can just pick this camera up and go with it. You can't do that with the Alexa mini. It requires a V-mount. It requires rods. It requires plates. It is a really involved camera system. It's not for run and gun. C200 also has a touchscreen. You can get places. You can tap focus. You can set your camera up much, much quicker than you can on the mini. When I began this test, a lot of people said that I'd be seeing a radical difference in the Alexa colors, the fabled Alexa color science that is rightly so become the industry standard, that you see these amazing films. I do it myself. I see these amazing films and I think, oh, they must have shot Alexa. That looks great. Usually they did, but what I think is at work here is less the color science, the camera, and more the fact that if people have the money to shoot on Alexa, they also have the money to get the very best lenses, the best talent, the best locations, the best lighting, the best post-production. Not that many people shooting on a $6,000 camera and spending millions of dollars on color grading. I discovered a few little tricks like pushing red back into the mid-tones, desaturating greens out of the darks, and a few other things. I've included them here in what I call the Canon 2 Arri lookup table that you can purchase in the description. For the reasonable sum of $20, you can make your C200 footage indistinguishable from Arri Alexa footage. I found that there really is a lot of kind of emperor's new clothes when it comes to the Arri color science. A lot of people are convinced that they can see something that data-wise isn't really there. That's our look at the Arri Alexa Mini compared to the Canon C200. I'm very excited to continue working with this footage, maybe taking it to a professional colorist and seeing their ideas about the color, the latitude, the dynamic range. If I had to shoot it featured tomorrow and the DP was pushing the Arri Alexa, I can now very confidently say that unless we intend to work in incredibly bright places, that the Canon C200 footage shooting in C-Log2 RAW is as good, if not better, than the image that the Arri Alexa Mini can provide. Thanks very much for watching, guys. I will see you next time.