[Pete Burger]

I’d rather shoot a clean-as-can-be picture and do all effects (b/w conversion, grain, …) in post. It’ll be a bit more time-consuming, but you’ll have more control.
Since (at least in the early beginnings) all those cameras were hand-cranked, you might want emulate that look (speeding a bit up and down). Time remapping (for example in After Effects) might be the way to this.
Maybe get a copy of Stu Maschwitz’ phenomenal book “The DV Rebels Guide”. On the included DVD there’s an After Effects script for “hand-cranked” look.
If you’re using After Effetcs, b/w conversion IMHO is best achieved not by simply reducing saturation but by either tinting or using the b/w conversion filter (which was introduced with CS5, I think, and works like the similar effect in Photoshop). With that filter you’ll have a lot of control over the final b/w look.
The “up-speed” look of that old silent movies in most cases is simply because those films are shown not in their original speed. Many of them are filmed with approximatley 18fps and screened with 24fps.
Grain can be introduced with appropriate filters or – also in After Effects with a very cool preset by Andrew Kramer (https://www.videocopilot.net/presets/fast_film_grain/)

hth

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Hi, Alberto!
You might want to take a look at this website:
https://cheesycam.com/
A lot of useful stuff!

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

[Frank Giardina] ” has been reformatted a number of times”

Reformatting a card doesn’t mean necessarily the footage is erased physically from the card. Like Bob wrote, if your files are not overwritten by new data, there is a realistic chance to recover the files with appropriate recovering software.
I had positive experience with Recuva from Pirisoft. But it’s Windows-only software.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

There’s nothing wrong with your lens.

When in Live-view mode and you look into your lens, you’ll see, the iris is fully open. The camera only calculates the settings you make (aperture, iso, …) and shows the result on the screen. So stepping up or down won’t really open or close the iris of your lens.

When in movie-mode the iris is really opening or closing, hence making a sound.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Shutterspeed is more or less an aesthetic descision. With shutterspeed you create (or reduce) motion-blur. The “rule” (“shutterspeed should be 2 x framerate”) creates a motion-blur that we are all used to and more or less instinctively accept as normal.

With higher shutterspeeds you’ll get less motion blur which means every single frame (every phase of animation) is sharp. This can lead to strobing choppy motion, which can be a welcome effect, for instance if you want to show something very hectical.

With slower shutterspeeds you’ll get more motion blur. With very slow shutterspeeds you’d get pictures with a dream-like quality.

The “rule” says: shutterspeed = 2 x framerate.

So when shooting 60fps you’d “have” to use a shutterspeed of 120 to get the “normal” motion blur. Even if you play back the footage with 24fps to create slomotion.

When shooting 60fps with a shutterspeed of 50 you’d get more motion-blur, than you might want to have.
IMHO the best way is to try different settings. Do a couple of tests and see what works for you and your footage.

In my experience, when just slowing down from 60fps to 24fps and you want a movie-like motion-blur, go with the “rule”. When slowing the footage down even more with plugins like Twixtor, it might be best to use even higher shutterspeeds to eliminate motion to a greater extent, since those tools work best with little to no motion blur at all.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

If it works for you, go ahead!

I just want to throw in, if you transcode to XDCAM (which is MPEG2, isn’t ist?) you’re recompressing material that was heavily compressed in the first place.
So, you’re losing valuable picture information which can lead to visible artifacts when colour-correcting or during final compression.

Transcoding to ProRes will preserve the original quality.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Thanks, Liam, for bringing that up!

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

A 32GB card will hold about 100min. of video in 12min. (or 4GB) clips.

Do you *need* multiple cards? Well, it depends on what you’re about to do? How much footage do you inted to shoot?

Simply out of security reasons, I’d get two or more 16GB cards rather than one big 32GB card. If one card fails you’d still have another card left. Another benefit: When one card is full, you can work with the second card and backup the first card in the meantime to your laptop…

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Yes, very often letterboxing is a creative choice.

1080p video is 16:9 (“widescreen”). If you like to have “super-widescreen”, like 2.35 : 1 (cinemascope) or even wider you have to letterbox your video in a 16:9 composition, since most platforms like Youtube or Vimeo don’t natively support those aspect ratios.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton

[Pete Burger]

Hi, Phil!

So does the T2i, but the “monitor with USB”-feature of Magic Lantern is for monitoring audio with headphones.

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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton