Picture a full cinema sensor as a large canvas. Before open gate, when a Cinema EOS camera recorded video, it did not use the entire canvas. It read only a rectangular portion of it, cropped to the output standard 16:9 widescreen frame. Everything outside that crop, the top, the bottom, the edges, was ignored.

The result was footage locked into a single aspect ratio from the moment you pressed record. A widescreen frame for cinema or broadcast. That was your output. If you later needed a vertical 9:16 cut for Reels, or a square 1:1, you were either cropping aggressively into already limited resolution, or you were going back to shoot again.

Open gate changes the equation entirely. Instead of reading a cropped portion of the sensor, the camera reads the full width and height of it, capturing everything in its native 3:2 ratio. On the C50, that means the full 7K sensor at 6960 x 4640 pixels. Nothing is discarded. Every pixel the sensor can see is recorded.

“What you get is not just more resolution. You get a frame that contains every format you will ever need, already inside it.,”

A 3:2 open gate frame holds enough image area to extract a 16:9 widescreen cut for broadcast or YouTube, a 9:16 vertical cut for Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and a 1:1 square for any platform that needs it, all from the same single take. Your editor can pull any of those formats in post without returning to set, without quality loss, and without compromise.

This is not a technical novelty for cinematographers. It is a direct response to how content actually gets made and distributed today. A single production rarely delivers to one screen. It delivers to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, a broadcast channel, a client website, sometimes all of them. Each platform has its own preferred format. Historically, that meant either planning separate shoots per platform or accepting heavy cropping and resolution loss on the non-widescreen cuts.

Open gate removes that problem at the source. You shoot once, in full resolution, with every delivery format already latent inside the frame. The post-production team does the rest.

“For solo creators and small production teams working across multiple platforms, this is the shift that makes a single-camera workflow genuinely viable at a professional standard.”

The C50 with the Open gate unlocks also proper anamorphic lens use. Anamorphic lenses work by compressing a wide image horizontally onto the sensor, to be de-squeezed in post for that classic cinematic widescreen look with oval bokeh and distinctive lens flares. When a camera crops the sensor before recording, it loses vertical information and shortchanges the anamorphic effect. Open gate preserves the full sensor height, giving anamorphic glass exactly what it needs. The C50 includes built-in de-squeeze preview at 2x, 1.8x, 1.5x, and 1.3x, so operators see the corrected image live on the LCD.

The Canon EOS C50 is built around a newly developed 7K full-frame CMOS sensor, paired with a DIGIC DV7 processor. It records Cinema RAW Light internally at up to 7K 60p, with 15+ stops of dynamic range and a dual base ISO of 800 and 6400 for strong low-light performance.

Dual Pixel CMOS AF II, inherited from Canon's professional mirrorless line, handles subject tracking in demanding conditions. It supports 12-bit recording, dual card slots for CFexpress Type B and SD, and native Frame.io Camera-to-Cloud integration for fast delivery workflows. It weighs approximately 680g with the handle. It is Netflix approved.

Open gate is not a feature just for professionals. It is the practical answer to a problem every modern production faces: one shoot, multiple platforms, no compromises.

The Canon EOS C50 brought that capability into the Cinema EOS line for the first time, and in doing so, made a camera that fits the way creative work actually gets done today. The sensor records everything. What you do with it is entirely up to you.