In a series of huge announcements, one of video’s biggest powerhouses, Canon, announced new camcorders with specs that are so good, you might just be tempted to take out a second mortgage to get one.

Canon announced their new products in stylish Hollywood event. They showcased their new C300 cinema-style camcorder, brand new cinema lenses, and a mysterious DSLR-style concept camera that shoots in 4K. The C300 was the story of the night since it marked Canon’s first foray into the cinema market. It has an 8.3 megapixel sensor that delivers a full 2 megapixels of information  for each color channel  meaning that color reproduction should be very accurate, much like the 3 CCD sensors of cameras in the past. The C300 will also include Canon’s newest DIGIC DV III image processor meaning that it will be able to handle those simultaneous feeds of color information accurately and quickly. In addition, it will record in Canon’s MXF format which means you’ll be getting a 4:2:2 MPEG-2 codec at 50 Mbps. Staying true to form, they’ve included two slots for CF cards in the camera so that you can record on both cards simultaneously or relay-record.

The C300 has a Super 35mm sensor, making it smaller than the recently announced EOS-1DX, but bigger than the sensor found in the 7 and 60D. A bit odd considering that sensor size is a big selling point for cinematographers since it typically means less noise in the image and gives the camera the ability to achieve a shallower depth of field. Even so, there are plenty of other great features on this camera that any pro will love. To begin, the camera is modular. That means that you can take almost everything off of the unit until it becomes more or less a camera ‘brain” housing just the sensor and processor. As such, it has an shoe mounted attachment that includes a 4 inch 1.23 megapixel monitor that can swivel 135 degrees horizontally and 270 degrees vertically and 2 XLR inputs with 48 volts of phantom power. The monitor also includes a waveform monitor to quickly see the overall brightness of a scene, an RGB Parade display for color saturation, a vectorscope, and an Edge Monitor Focus Assist for getting your image sharp. The camcorder records audio in an uncompressed 16-bit PCM format at 48 kHz giving you great control in post over how your captured audio sounds.

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Due to their beautifully captured footage and high quality lenses, DSLRs have seriously captured the hearts of filmmakers the world over. In fact, if you were at NAB this year then you no doubt know that this was the year of 3D and the video DSLR. Everywhere we looked while running to and fro on the show floor there was at least one person holding  a shiny new DSLR camera. Even Videomaker this year decided that in order to get the best quality possible for our readers, that we would use our Canon 1D Mark IV to capture interviews. So when we spotted the kind people from Cinema 5D with a sleek looking DSLR rig, we decided to figure out just exactly what equipment they had and why they went the the DSLR themselves. Ironically, they were using the cousin to our camera, with their Canon 5D camera mounted on a Redrock Micro DSLR cinema bundle shoulder mount, a LitePanel Micro, and a Sennheiser shotgun microphone. It’s seriously enough to make your mouth water. Even though we didn’t have a nice Sennheiser microphone and a shoulder mount, our interview with Cinema 5D’s News Director Jared Abrams still ended up looking beautiful. Check out their rig in it’s full glory in the video after the break!

Studies show during tough economic times that people tend to flock in droves to theaters as a cheap form of entertainment and to ultimately try to escape reality. In 2009 that theory was proven once again. Without adjusting for inflation, 2009 became the biggest box-office year to date grossing over 10 billion dollars!

Besides the fact that 2009 was hit hard with a downturn in the economy, 2009 had a respectable cinema line up – worthy of the droves that flocked to theaters. With the recent release of Avatar; James Cameron’s first theatrical movie since Titanic, (i.e. the highest grossing movie ever) along with movies like District 9, The Hang Over, Paranormal Activity and Monsters vs. Aliens, there was something in theaters this year for just about everyone.

2009′s incredible benchmark was aided by a 28 cent increase in ticket prices from the year before that totaled to an average of $7.46 a ticket. With that fact in mind, 2009 didn’t necessarily attract the most people of all time into the theaters – but it was the most financially successful. Although the total number of tickets sold is expected to reach 1.4 billion, that figure is not expected to break the record 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002.

With such a high number of ticket sales, I’m sure some of our readers have seen one or two films this year. So what about you? What movies have you seen?