[Chad Gilmour]

The HVX in 720p dvc pro still only looks about the same as the big panasonic cameras in SD mode. Granted those cameras are 4x as big and the lens is as big as the entire HVX 200 and this chip size is 2x as big, but that’s a pretty big advance to have a $6000 camera with $2000 of add ons that will give you results simmiliar to those of a SD $30,000 camera. I agree with last response, if you shoot in a high format and downconvert, it’ll hold up pretty well.

[Chad Gilmour]

I guess it kinda depends on what you think the majority of the moniters it is going to be viewed on are 16×9 or 4×3.

I’m finishing up a video where I was forced to use a native 16×9 camera and a native 4×3 camera and I know that most of the people watching it are probably going to be watching it on a 4×3. So I’m letter boxing the 4×3 footage to match the 16×9. Then that gives you a little wiggle room to do some creative stuff that will add a different dynamic to the product. I am going to add a slight white stroke on the top and bottom lines of the video which gives it kindof different look, and I can play with the background (where the letterbox bars are). You can have a soft muted motion background or whatever behind the footage, but visable where the letterbox bars should be. You could even make it change with the flow of emotion in the video.

This is my prefered way, to make it fit a 4×3, because my work gets shown on dvd’s not the air waves, so the dvd player and tv will compensate to show the 4×3 on a 16×9 tv with out distortion, it just has black on the right and left sides of the frame.

[Chad Gilmour]

It’s a little difficult to understand what look your trying to achieve, have you seen this look somewhere before? When you say hyperspace zoom it makes me think of that look in starwars and stargate with that whole traveling through a tunnel or worm hole look. I’ve created similiar looking things with the “cc particle world”. You can create an interesting radial “explosion” type of emission and then animate the Z or Y property to make the emitter move deeper into the image, away from the camera, and it will look like your traveling through a worm hole. You might try experimenting with that and applying it at different opacities and blending modes on top of your footage, and perhaps putting a zoom blur on top of that.

But like I said I’m not sure if that’s even the look your trying to achieve.

[Chad Gilmour]

Alright, well here comes a long winded post, sorry for the length.

Myself and 2 others put together a video highlighting a week long jr. high camp mid-july. There are 3 of us responsible for making a video and cranking it out by the last day, there is one or 2 media guys running powerpoint, playing video clips ect. and one or more audio engineers/sound board operaters. They have 3 screens and projectors, all connected to the same source and playing the same thing.

Every morning they have big meetings involving the entire camp in the main auditorium where they have the kids do insane things, every year it’s different things. Last year they had at one point big buckets of water in the front. They filled the buckets with water and random crap and they had the kids basically dunk their head in and pull out goldfish or something weird with their mouth. All the kids (which there is a few hundred) rush the front and try to get as close to the action as they can. And the camera people have to be up there and film the crazieness the best we can. Tripods won’t work well because we have to move around a lot and with so many kids up there we wouldn’t be able to zoom in from the back because many times the action is taking place close to the ground and the kids would be in the way. So we, the camera people, almost have to fight for the best spot, and we are literally surrounded by well over a hundred kids which makes running around with a long cable practically impossible, and I don’t think we would have any help with the cable, ie: somebody behind us holding the cable slack and moving it around and such.

The distance from us to the media booth is around 100 feet, maybe a little more.

It’s almost total pandamonium with little help and it’s not like you can suddenly just reason with a couple hundred jr. highers and tell them to get out of the way; they’d never hear me and probably would ignore me even if they did hear me. So I figured instead of trying to snake a cable up there and have a hundred people tripping on it and stuff, I thought it’d be way easier to send a wireless signal to the booth.

I do however agree with you that running cable is easy and very reliable. My only concern is that the hoards of kids would make running cable impossible, if we could get them stay seated it might work. I’ll probably mention that possibility to my client. I look forward to your (or anybody elses for that matter) response.

Thanks so much.

[Chad Gilmour]

thanks for your help/input, I’ll probably be getting the sony’s very soon

[Chad Gilmour]

thanks for the tip

[Chad Gilmour]

I’ve found that the higher shutter speed you use when filming helps a ton in keeping the “smudging” or blurring look down when you slow down your footage in your NLE. I do realize you have to open up the iris more thus helping get rid of extra lattitude, but I did a wedding recently where I shot at around 1/120-1/180 shutter speed instead of the typical 1/60th and when I slowed it down it looked a hell of a lot better and I actually had a fellow colleague ask how my slow-mo footage looked so good. This technique need quite a bit of light though.