Getting back into the game and need advice

[Mark Suszko]

For the entire 2-3 years of my wedding business, I never owned the cameras. I rented them on an as-needed basis from local guys that knew me. Kept my costs low and my profit high.

The HMC will probably be fine for the upcoming gig, as long as you have great audio captured. What you want to do, and this I’ve learned from friends who are better at the business than I am, is to always have enough mark-up in your price that each gig buys you one more piece of what you need to own. If you’re not charging enough to be able to add a new light or whatever from the profits of each gig, your business is stagnating, not growing.

You don’t need to own everything right away; build a core of the “evergreen” things like the good tripod and pan head, mics and cables, basic lighting kit. Then from there, budget for growth, so you can expand the lighting kit, get more grip gear, more mics, recorders, etc. over time. They dont need to all be new, either: people who bought too much new stuff without any business to pay for it are constantly dumping low-mileage stuff on ebay and craig’s, pawn shops, etc. Shop smart.

[Dwain Williams]

Can’t thank you enough for all your insight to my extremely novice questions….here’s another…hehe

Currently the to offers I’m looking at is:

(2) Panasonic HC-X1000 4K for (4) days for $380 delivered

or

(2) Panasonic AG-AC160A for Fri-Monday for $300 (not sure of shipping charge yet)

Best Deal?

[Mark Suszko]

An advantage of shooting 4k is that you can frame your actual shots a little wider, then add zooms, pans, tilts, and re-framings in post, while delivering a clean 2K final product. Helpful when you need to create a closeup from an existing wide shot, or crop out the uncle nobody likes to re-compose a key shot. That’s probably worth the extra money in this case, as long as your editing system is up to the load.

[Dwain Williams]

Well, I’m going with the new retina Imac and the Panasonic AG Ac90A . I want to rent a second AG AC90A but can’t seem to find one. Will a different camera (a different HD Panasonic) look close enough to use? Thanks

[Mark Suszko]

What I do in mixed camera situations is, I have a color chip chart, ( a Macbeth) I set out in the actual lighting situation, and after white-balancing all the cameras, I shoot a sample of that chart on each. When you bring that footage back, it’s easy to do a split-wipe and apply color correction until the scope patterns are identical. Even once you do that, though, cameras from different makers will have different reactions to identical environments. If you calibrate carefully, customers won’t notice, but a professional grader might.

[Max Palmer]

I shoot weddings as well, and am trying to come off of the dSLR bandwagon (it’s a great way to start though, which is why I did it). I haven’t had a hand at shooting with many different cameras, but I picked up a C100 MKI, now that the price has dropped so much, and I am completely flabbergasted by the images I’m getting out of this thing. It’s blowing away both my 6D and my XF100 in both image quality, noise levels, and dynamic range. It’s pretty frills-free, but from what I’ve been reading and experiencing, the image quality can’t be beat at that price range. It does exactly what I need a camera to do, which is allow me to still get that “big sensor” look (it’s a Super35), have professional audio features, and have something I can leave locked off on a tripod without worrying about recording limit.