[Micah Mcdowell]

Yep, I just try to find something new to learn. In fact, I taught myself After Effects last summer when things were slow at work; this year I’ve worked on 3D modeling when there’s no projects coming up.

Having a guitar around to pick up and jam doesn’t hurt either, if you’re so inclined.

[Micah Mcdowell]

The above is certainly true. The cameras don’t have true professional XLR inputs, so you’re stuck with cheesy little 1/8″ adapters, which aren’t ideal but could still be workable.

As for optics, you could get a Letus35 Mini adapter and put nice 35mm glass on any of the small Canons, and you get true 35mm narrow depth-of-field. However, that would triple your investment and make the price gap to pro cameras much smaller, but it is an option.

Of course, an EX1 or something of its caliber will always be a better option, since you can only go so far with accessorizing a cheap consumer camera before it gets ridiculous.

[Micah Mcdowell]

I know that the small Canons are highly regarded, such as the HV30 and HF10. I have used both on occasion, and the video quality is really quite amazing for the ridiculously small size and price of the cameras. The small Sonys are nice as well.

These little cameras will all obtain similar quality; your first consideration should probably be what format you want to edit from; HDV tape, AVCHD on SD cards, etc. With the HDV tape cameras, you get decent quality, an instant archive of footage, and a workflow that is more like what you have with the GL2s, but you’re familiar with running tapeless with the EX1, so it’s your call.

Remember, these little guys are capable of some impressive imagery, but they are still a tiny, cheaply made form factor and greatly lacking in professional controls and features, so keep that in mind. I would say that they’re more suited to studio shooting than anything if you’re trying to get maximum quality out of them. Heck, you can even record uncompressed HD (or a high-quality superior codec of your choice) live from the HDMI outputs on these cameras to a computer in the studio, if you’re so inclined.

[Micah Mcdowell]

You definitely could use Premiere…

Or, you could take Adobe After Effects if you have it and drop all your images in a composition, scale them and trim them all to 1 frame at the same time while they’re all selected, and then go to Animation>Keyframe Assistant>Sequence Layers.

And, voilà, you’re done with your project. That method would take 30 seconds, while in Premiere you’d have to scale every frame individually (unless there’s a better workflow I don’t know in Premiere).

[Micah Mcdowell]

Well, you’ve got 2 hours of footage… that’s about 25gb of standard definition DV video if my math’s right.

I would maybe borrow/buy a cheap external USB hard drive and put everything on that… that way you avoid using a pile of 5 or 6 DVDs plus all the encoding time/quality loss.

If you’re dealing with Premiere use DV AVIs.

[Micah Mcdowell]

If you’re playing on a standard DVD player, you want 720×480, 29.97 frames per second (it doesn’t matter if it’s a 10 inch tv or a 60 inch HDTV, the resolution will be the same if you’re putting it on a regular DVD in a regular DVD player). If you’re doing Blu-ray, this changes things a bit.

MOV and AVI are just container formats so it’s hard to tell exactly how your program is encoding them, since I have no experience with it. The PNG sequence sounds promising, but you may want to experiment.

[Micah Mcdowell]

Can’t you just import your MPEG-2 into your Premiere project directly? It will have to render in the timeline but you shouldn’t have to transcode before importing. This is the best option.

If you do have to transcode whatever format you have to get into Premiere, you want a DV AVI file with PCM audio.

[Micah Mcdowell]

I recently bought an old Colorvision Spyder (the first one that came out I think) and it made a HUGE difference for my desktop monitors; lots of highlight detail was being lost since the brightness and gamma were way off, and the colors were a bit weird too until the Spyder cleared things up. So, the Spyders work GREAT for calibrating your monitors for graphics (even the cheapest models aren’t bad).

However…

For video, you’re still gonna be flying blind until you get a proper preview monitor; there’s just no alternative. If you’re just doing SD, you can find some crazy bargains if you shop around; my Sony BVM cost me all of $40 in mint condition.

So, I’d buy a low end Spyder for around $50, and then keep your eyes peeled for something you can use for a true NTSC monitoring solution.

[Micah Mcdowell]

Looks interesting… I’m writing this from my new iPhone 3GS, so this intrigues me greatly. Maybe I’ll try making a whole short film on my phone; could be a unique aesthetic.

[Micah Mcdowell]

Here’s a page I found that has export settings for Youtube that generally work great for me:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/you_tube_redux_gary.html

It’s geared toward Mac/Compressor users, but there’s some valuable tips for encoding using Windows software like Premiere as well.