Canon C70 XF-AVC VS RAW

[Anders-RT]

In my experience the C70 has always felt a bit soft and lacked that last level of detail compared to many cameras that uses prores for example. I have read some reviews that claims that XF-AVC is as good as RAW codec.  So i did some quick tests with different codecs and found that even with the best settings for XF-AVC the difference to RAW is  really striking.  From now on I will always use RAW unless there are som drawbacks i'm not yet aware of. RAW LT uses even less data than 410 Mb/s. So I'm now wondering fit there is something wrong with my cameras encoding or is it a feature an all C70? Is C300 mark III any better?

About the pictures below:

The detail level in the camera is pushed to +30 and I applied a  LUT from Canon on the Clog 2 shoot and aded  0.46 sharpening in Resolve. But still the difference is huge.

For example;

- While the read label on the bottle is vivid and nice in the raw codec it is blurry and pale in the XF-AVC.    

- The painting is over all sharper and more detail in the surfaces.

- The small text on the fuse board is totally blurred with XF-AVC.  

I've graded the luma levels to match and zoomed in 200% (so the difference remains in a jpeg still)

RAW LT CodecXF-AVC 422 Intra 410Mbps

[Hazel_T]

Hi Anders-RT,

We do expect there to be variations in footage recorded with XF-AVC verses footage recorded in RAW format. RAW format is the raw light data that the camera collected during the shoot. It retains much more information than XF-AVC, so RAW footage can be pushed more during editing and it can retain more detail. 

XF-AVC has more baked into the file that will limit how much could be recovered or edited in post compared to RAW footage. XF-AVC format is a middle ground between RAW and MP4. Since more is baked into an XF-AVC file color grading and editing on an XF-AVC file can't be pushed as much as a RAW file, so if you are on a time crunch it can be helpful for streamlining your shoot. Since XF-AVC retains more information than MP4 you still have more editing options compared to what you could do with an MP4 file. 

The best format to use depends on what you are trying to do. If you plan on doing a lot of color grading and editing to your footage RAW would likely be the best choice. 

In your above examples we would expect the RAW file to be able to recover more detail by sharpening in post than an XF-AVC file. Since the RAW file has more data for each pixel value it can recover more sharpness when sharpening is applied in post.

[Anders-RT]

Right, thank you for your  answer. I also discovered that shooting in Rec709 Wide DR results in a sharper and more detail picture quality than C-log 2 or 3 when using the XF-AVC codec. 

[rs-eos]

I no longer have my C70, but I did a brief experiement in comparing RAW to XF-AVC (see linked topic).

One con of RAW (at least with the firmware at the time) was that you were then limited as to what you could capture on the secondary card.  I think there was also a limitation of not being able to engage Digital IS when recording RAW.