Often when working on a commercial, corporate video, or industrial video, we make a last minute call to add more cameras. Has that ever happened to you? It seems inevitable that a job that started out as a single camera becomes two before the scout, and even three by the time we prep. It can be a struggle to find an operator last minute that owns the same camera already chosen as A cam, or a rental house that has both cameras and lenses available to match both the required look and budget. That is, unless you’re shooting Canon.

The Canon C200 is a compact camcorder that utilizes the same basic sensor as their flagship Super35 digital cinema camera, the C700. One of the C200's most striking features is the ability to record 4K RAW files in Canon's new Cinema RAW Light format to an internal CFast card. Cinema RAW Light is a lightly compressed RAW video format that maximizes recording time while giving up very little file quality in comparison to "full fat" RAW.

Our customers are always asking for "the perfect camera", one that fits all of their needs and then some. Of course, there is no such thing as the perfect solution for everyone; however, there are some key requirements that we hear all the time. Most new cameras today have features that set them apart from each other and sound great on paper, but when it comes time to go into production the camera needs to be a solid tool that preforms a required task.

A few months ago, Andy wrote an article for HDVideoPro called Making 4K Plug & Play about how to use the Canon C500 with AJA's Ki Pro Quad to easily record and monitor 4K video. Getting these two to play nice isn't too difficult, but there are a few things to be aware of if you want to get the best results possible.

Canon has released their very easy to use Cinema RAW Development software for Mac OS Lion and Mountain Lion, which allows you to ingest, play, and export Canon RAW files.

The new Canon C500 is just hitting the streets, offering both internal 50 Mbps 422 recording, as well even higher quality outputs. The camera can output HD & 2K in 4:2:2 up to 120p, or 4:4:4 up to 60p, and uncompressed 4K Raw data up to 60p and 120p at half vertical resolution.