 Hey, it's The Crimson Engine, my name is Rubidium, and today we're looking at how to get the most out of your C200. So I love this camera, I've had it for almost a year now, I've shot a bunch of different projects, documentaries, interviews, short films, narrative, music videos with it and it just keeps bringing out a really great image and I've learned a lot about how to work with it, how to work with the footage, how to work with the camera, and I thought I'd pass on my top tips for if you just bought a C200, how you can get the most out of it. We'll start with the physical stuff. I have the C200B because it was $1,500 cheaper than the one with the monitor because I had before this camera had shot on the C100 and really the the it's not that the quality of the monitor isn't great or that the touchscreen isn't great, it's the size. It's just too small, like if you're a filmmaker everything depends on what's in the frame and if the frame is only this small it means it's really hard to see if things are sharp, if things are in focus, if things are you know the color contrast you're getting, the exposure it's just it just doesn't make sense to me to you know buy a real expensive camera and be constrained by a tiny little screen. So I have a Blackmagic Video Assist 7 inch 4k that I mount on top of the camera with a shape handle which gives me a huge big display to operate from, I have a sun shade for it when I'm outside, it's much nicer to look at, much less straining on the eyes gives me a much better idea of what my exposure is, what my focus is, it also contains false color. That brings me to my second point is if you're going to be mounting accessories on this like a monitor like rails like extra batteries going by a cage shape cells one that I have but there are other ones out there it basically just encapsulates your camera inside a metal housing and lets you you know bolt all kinds of things to the side to the back to the front. It means that you're every time you change the tripod plate change the handle the configuration you're not scratching or you know working with the camera itself you're just working with the cage. So in a couple of years when I trade this camera in for hopefully the C400 full frame fingers crossed I'm hoping that my camera will be in mint condition because the only thing that's ever been screwed into the tripod mount at the bottom is the camera cage and then everything else goes into the cage. It also protects it from being banged around and from falling it's just a really good idea to build everything out of one central point which is your cage. Not having the touchscreen monitor a lot of people ask me if I miss the touch focus aspect where the C200 lets you poke the different parts of the screen that you want in focus and I don't because I use my phone or my iPad to do the same thing. A lot of people don't know that this camera has Wi-Fi enabled network and it lets you bring up a live view image in your browser touch different areas to focus on them you can also adjust ISO you can adjust the f-stop if you're using a stills lens you can adjust all kinds of cool things so it is a little bison time to get to you go to this menu here go down to enable Wi-Fi to turn on the network I wish they'd made this easy to find out but what you do then is go to your iPhone or your iPad or whatever type in this number here which is the default Canon IP address and it'll bring up this cool display where you can see what you're shooting you can enable live view you can do camera adjustments you can do focus there are all kinds of interesting constraints on this that if the director or the cinematographer has one of these on set it stops other people from messing with the camera settings if they're looking at it as well but I think if most people who are just own operators or just the DP is going to play with this I actually used this recently to sort of do a shot where I didn't have a permit we were in the forecourt of a big building downtown and they had security guards there we wanted a shot of a girl walking through frame so what we did was just set the camera up and I just you know adjusted focus and and press record from the iPad we were definitely looked like a film crew but we didn't look like we were shooting we just told the security guard we were waiting for our ride to come and we're able to do all the operating from the phone so that was great I say this a lot in these videos but to get the most out of this camera you have to shoot raw there's just so much more color depth there's just so much more latitude and a lot of people know that but they don't want to do it because the cards cost a lot and it just gums up your whole hard drive with all these giant raw files the way that I get around that is never take the raw off the card I put the card in the reader bring the file up in DaVinci Resolve from the card great it and then output a ProRes 422 or ProRes 444 in 2k or 4k onto my hard drive which becomes my new graded master that I then edit and output in Premiere if you're just getting your feet wet with raw and you want to experiment with how much more depth those raw files give you especially since this camera lacks a 422 codec this is definitely what I would recommend it works it works a treat I've done all these you know 70 plus YouTube videos on it and it really makes a difference in my opinion oh I got a couple of emails the last few weeks talking about the grain on the C200 and how a lot of people are getting grain in the darks that they don't like histogram the waveform here that my skimmy skin tones are set to like 60 if you see here the the whole bottom stop I leave empty meaning that I raise the exposure on the camera to mean that there's nothing in this this bottom 10 percent if you do put stuff in that bottom 10 percent it will be very grainy you can put things all the way up here and they'll curve off much nicer than you would expect them to on a DSLR but the bottom two stops on the C200 are very grainy with raw they're less grainy with mp4 because the C log 3 actually eliminates these two stops they were so grainy that when they made C log 3 they basically left them out but what's good with raw is if you need them you can always you shoot in that space use a denoiser and rescue them but for most people it's better just to kind of keep your blacks out of that space keep your blacks at 18 or 15 percent and higher you won't have any noise issues I also like to shoot when I can control the light I like to shoot at ISO 400 or lower here we are ISO 250 blacks and nice and clean no grain issues at all with my footage here when I shoot like that this camera turned out to be everything that I hoped it would be and I'm getting really great footage I'm going to shoot a feature in this with this camera later this year very excited about that keep you in the loop but for now I'll see you next time