Rhett Owen walks through the features that stood out during Hope Community Church’s hands-on test of the Canon C50.
At Hope Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, the film team does not need a camera that only looks good on a spec sheet. It needs a camera that can move.
One day, the team may be shooting documentary-style interviews. The next, it may be grabbing B-roll, creating social media pieces, building a music video or producing stop-motion animation. For Rhett Owen, lead filmmaker at Hope, the goal is a workflow that stays productive without becoming frantic.
Hope Community Church found a camera that could move from interviews to B-roll without slowing the team down.
“We like to call our workflow moderate but sustainable,” Owen says. “We like to work a few weeks ahead if we can, but we’re always open to grabbing something quick if something better pops up.”
That made the Canon EOS C50 a useful camera to test. Hope used it on tripod-based interviews, handheld b-roll, monopod work, gimbal shots, and stop-motion projects. Owen’s first reaction was that the camera felt smaller and lighter than expected.
“It’s very DSLR, but a little chunkier,” he says. “Very light, very easy to move, very easy to handle.”
But the bigger surprise was not the size. It was how little the camera got in the way.
“The C50 is a great little 7K open-gate camera,” Owen says. “It’s light, it’s versatile, it’s quick, and it’s small, so it really helps keep productions moving.”
For a church production team, that matters. A camera that is too complicated becomes a staff-only tool. A camera that is too limited gets left behind on important shoots.
Simultaneous crop recording helps one shoot serve the edit bay and the social media team at the same time.
The C50 landed in a useful middle ground: not a camera Owen would ask a beginner to fully configure, but one he could hand off once the basic settings were in place.
“I wouldn’t give it to a beginner to set up, but I would give it to a beginner to shoot with,” he says. “Because the autofocus is so good, you can kind of say, ‘Here are the basic settings, go,’ and they could just do it.”
Autofocus became one of the strongest takeaways from the test.
“The autofocus in particular seems very snappy, very quick and very precise,” Owen says. “Even handing it to volunteers or people who don’t use cameras like this as much, the footage coming back from it was so good.”
The image held up, too. Hope mixed the C50 with other cameras during interview shoots, and Owen says most viewers could not spot the difference. That is exactly what he wanted.
“That’s a sign that you can take this camera, put it into any production, into any video, into any environment, and it’s going to fit right into your workflow,” he says.
The feature that may matter most for church teams, though, is how the C50 turns that larger 7K open-gate capture into a practical workflow advantage: simultaneous crop recording.
Hope could shoot a normal 16:9 image for edited video while also recording a vertical version for social media to a second card. That meant fewer extra steps after the shoot.
“You can take your card with your 16:9 footage straight to your editing bay,” Owen says, “and hand over the social media clips on a different card straight to your social media team.”
That is the kind of feature that sounds technical but solves a very normal church problem: everyone wants the same shoot to feed the weekend recap, the website, YouTube, Instagram, and whatever needs to be posted by tomorrow morning.
The C50 was not perfect. Owen said outdoor shooting could be difficult because the rear screen was not bright enough in some situations. He would like to see an eyecup or electronic viewfinder option.
Still, his overall impression was clear.
“This camera is great for almost any situation I think you can really throw at it,” Owen says. “Whether that be live, creating interview videos, b-roll, using it with volunteers—the form factor, the ease of use and the image quality are great for almost anything.”
For churches trying to create more video without turning every shoot into a full production day, that may be the C50’s real pitch.
It is not just a small cinema camera. It is a serious camera that lets a church team stay fast.
