Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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Panasonic GH5 or GH5s, or Sony Alpha, probably A7III, or A7sII. A kit lens will be fine for most purposes. Panasonic and Sony each have their own XLR audio adapter that you should get so you can hook the camera up to a decent mike (you did plan for audio, right?). You’ll need either a shotgun mike that you can hang on a c-stand above your subject, or a lavalier mike, either wired or wireless, so you can get good audio. You’ll need lighting as well, and that’s a whole other rabbit hole. Light stands, c-stands. Get a tripod, for sure. You’re looking at between $4000 – $8000 for a complete setup, depending on how good you want it to be.
What concerns me is this: you say you’re completely new to video work, yet you’re about to produce a bunch of training videos for a company that expects professional-level work? I hope, for your sake, that you’re an in-house person who’s gotten this as an assignment, and has time for some trial and error.
If you’re doing this as a freelancer, you need to stop, right now, and learn the craft before you try to charge a client for your work. There is much, much, much, much more to getting professional quality results than selecting the right camera. So much more. I just can’t tell you how much more there is. There is SO MUCH.
You need to understand framerates, codecs, lighting, audio, image composition, editing, how to shoot the appropriate b-roll, video compression…if you aren’t comfortable doing ALL of those things, then you need to throw your hand up right now and tell your client. Because not only will you be setting yourself up for failure, you’ll be screwing your client over, and potentially even opening yourself up for legal trouble.
I don’t want to discourage you–video CAN be learned, but it CAN’T be learned in a day, and certainly not on the job on your first day of professional work.
I’m usually the first to jump all over the curmudgeons who usually tell people they can’t do things, but this has major red flags. I promise you, you do NOT want to fake your way through professional video work, because even the pros get tripped up on a regular basis.
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I can’t speak for the A7RIII, but all prior Sony Alpha cameras have not included any metadata of exposure settings in the XML files that come with the video. It gives the format, framerate, and audio format. Still images have metadata, but video does not.
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Then you’re stuck with setting up a 16×9 sequence, and scaling up your video to match. You’ll lose the top and bottom, but that’s no different than if you’d letterboxed it.
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Hah, well, if being right means that I can waltz in and say “I bet there’s a menu setting for that,” then you’re going to see me being right a LOT more often ☺ I’m glad someone more specific than me could help you track it down!
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You can also check out Atomic Stretch, which is a free plugin built for exactly this application:
I have no affiliation, just have used it once or twice. It works pretty well!
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I haven’t experienced this before, but have you verified that the levels aren’t changing by looking at the VU meters, or that it sounds different on your headphones? I believe the FS7 can separate headphone levels from input levels in the audio menus. It would be worth a deep dive into the audio menu to see what you can find–my camera isn’t right in front of me, but I would bet that there’s some setting that got flipped that’s causing that.
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Good post, Jeff.
One thing to add–if you use the method of Interpreting footage, Warp Stabilizer will play nicely with it. However, if you’ve changed the speed of the clip either using timeline keyframes or the Speed/Duration dialog box, Warp Stabilizer will NOT work.
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If you need to work at the native timebase of the 60p footage, you can still interpret the footage to an even-numbered division of that framerate to get 50% speed slow motion. So you work in a 59.94 timeline, interpret the footage as-needed to 29.97 for 50% speed. That way, you get an even distribution of frames across your timeline, so no tearing–it just doubles up the frames displayed.
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You need to interpret the footage to fit the project timebase. Highlight the footage in the bin, right click it, and select Modify > Interpret Footage. Set the framerate to your project timebase. Now the footage will play back, frame for frame, at the same framerate as the sequence, without changing the Speed setting.
If your machine has issues playing back 60p footage, you might see some horizontal tearing during playback, but you wouldn’t see frame jumps unless there’s a framerate mismatch between your project and your media.
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When you shoot for slow motion, you need to use a faster framerate than your main timebase.
If you want to be able to really slow down your shots, you need to use a 23.976 timebase, and Interpret Footage so that your 59.94 footage is showed at 23.976, which is slowed down by 2.5x. Or use a 29.97 timebase, which is a 2x slowdown. Right now, with a 59.94 timebase, slowing down your footage just stretches existing frames across others, which creates the “jitter” you’re describing.
This is pretty basic stuff, so you may want to find some tutorials on shooting higher speed framerates for a slower timebase so that you can really understand it before going out and making mistakes on set.