Planning

[Joe Mcneilly]

The EX1 is a fantastic camera, workflow is really streamlined. I hate upscaling and mixing formats, if you can shoot at your delivery size life is much easier!

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Craig Mieritz] “The narrative footage will be shot in 1080/24, some with a 5D and future acquisition with a higher end 1080P cinema-type camera tbd. The documentary footage will be acquired with a camcorder, the choices being an EX1 or HPX 170.”

[Craig Mieritz] “If I acquire in 720PN, am I making things too complicated or possibly compromising quality since there will be some intercutting of footage and everything will be delivered in 1080?”

You are already making your life very complicated just by wanting to shoot in more than one format. Life is too short, and most indie documentaries are already too likely to never be finished. If you want to improve your chances of actually finishing your doc, choose one camera and stick with it.

The EX1 and HPX 170 are both very easy to work with and make very good pictures. The Cannon SLR cameras, IMO require too complicated a workflow within FCP. If you want shallow depth of field, use an EX3 or an HPX 3xx and use wide aperture still lenses on that. You can vary the look of the video by lighting differently, by using different lenses, by composing differently.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Michael Gissing]

Start with the final delivery. On the basis of where and how the final product is to be screened, make a decision about frame rate and use only one frame rate. 1080 is best so stick with it.

As Arnie says, using multiple cameras with different base codecs complicates workflow and means everything should be transcoded to a base codec like ProRes. This will also determine hard drive requirements.