Canon C500 Mark II Low-Light Test & 6K Raw Clip to Download

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by Ollie KenchingtonDecember 9^th, 2019

Our friend Ollie Kenchington used to be a regular cinema5D writer until recently, but since his day job at his production company KORRO is keeping him extremely busy, he is now an irregular contributor to the site. In this post, he tells us about his first experiences with the new Canon C500 Mark II in low light. Full disclosure: Ollie is not a Canon Ambassador, though he does occasionally do paid work for them as a trainer/speaker.

Back in September, at IBC, I had the opportunity to have a play with some 6K raw footage captured with the C500 Mark II. It occurred to me then that it would be great if more people could have the same opportunity to experiment with this powerful codec. I therefore proposed to Canon that they send me a unit prior to release, with the intention of capturing content that could be made freely available for interested users to download and play with at home. I finally got the chance to do just that last week.

6K Raw Demo

You can see the short sequence I cut together from the 6K raw footage here:

I only intended to capture the sunrise and the tree, so the rest was just me killing time between the sun coming up, and when it eventually hit the tree.
You can download the raw shot of the tree (pictured below) from here. FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY. © KORRO LIMITED 2019

This is the camera original file. Please note, all cameras apply noise reduction internally when not shooting raw. If you haven’t seen raw footage before, you may be surprised with the amount of noise you see in low light areas. This is normal and a consequence of capturing a completely unadulterated image. Noise reduction can (and should) be applied in post when processing raw footage.
Filmed at Shearwater Lake, Longleat Estate, Wiltshire, England Dec. 2019 with a pre-production* model Canon EOS C500 Mark II.

Technical Details:
Codec – Canon Cinema Raw Light (CRM) Frame Rate – 25fps
Resolution – 5952 x 3140
Bit Depth – 12bit
Chroma Subsampling – 4:4:4
White Balance – 5600k Daylight Preset Colour Matrix – Neutral
Gamma – Canon C-Log2
Gamut – Canon Cinema Gamut
ISO – 800
Lens used – Canon 16mm-35mm f2.8L

Low-Light Demo