Sebastian Alvarez
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not a professional, in fact I’m trying to start an events video business myself, but at this point in time I would never buy SD cameras. Keep in mind that Blu-Ray players have come down to $200 for the cheapest ones, and more and more people are buying them. When you put in a Hollywood movie on DVD in a Blu-Ray player it doesn’t look as good as the Blu-Ray version, but it looks decent. When you put in a DVD of 29.97i video, even if sourced from a good camera and encoded at 9 Mbps, it looks barely OK. If you encode it at 7 Mbps it looks awful. You see mosquito noise everywhere. But even at 9 Mbps it looks without detail, kind of blurry. The biggest difference between SD and HD can be seen when looking at videos, not movies.
Doing a quick search I see that the PD150 retails for around $3,000. B&H is selling the Sony HVR-HD1000U, a great entry level HDV camera, for $1429. I just got it and I can tell you it’s beautiful. Sure, I would add a couple more things, but for less than $1500 it’s superb. It has a ring that you can customize to about 8 different functions, and too many convenient features to list here, but it’s the best bang for the buck you can find these days. And you can use it as HD or SD if you prefer. The only drawback is that it’s tape based, but the closest AVCHD camera that you can get, the Panasonic Panasonic AG-HMC70U, does not have a ring, so if you have to adjust focus fast, you’re screwed. I did a wedding two months ago at a rose garden, and the couple had long vertical plants as the background. Back then I didn’t have the HVR-HD1000U, just my good old Canon HF100 (AVCHD), which I had on auto focus because it doesn’t have a ring and to adjust its focus you have to navigate a joystick, which makes you move the camera and also the clicks from the joystick are audible in the recording. I had the camera on a tripod and I was constantly looking at the monitor, which like three inches wide, and to me it seemed on focus, but when I got home and watched it on my 40″ TV, I saw that in the parts where I had zoomed in close to the couple the camera had focused on the plants in the back and their faces were out of focus. Not terribly so, enough for me not to catch it in the tiny screen, but obviously I was really pissed off about it. Had I owned the HVR-HD1000U back then it wouldn’t have happened because I would’ve had the ring set to focus, and I would’ve seen it better in the viewfinder.
But going back to the tape problem, I’m going to plan my events with these two cameras, since the great thing about the Canon HF100 is that I can put 2 hours and 11 minutes of continuous recording in a SDHC card, probably more now that 32 GB cards are available. That way not only I have an extra take in case something goes wrong with either camera, but also when I run out of tape in my Sony I know the Canon is still shooting those 30 or 40 seconds it takes to eject and replace the tape, not to mention if the tape causes a drop out that makes you lose about 7 frames.
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[Ron Lindeboom] “Me, I’d call the bride and tell her that I had a great idea for the video that I would like to stage to get a close-in shot of the kiss and would she mind putting on her dress one more time to get the kiss.”
Could work for a wedding, not so much for, let’s say, a school play. If it’s a school play, you can pray that it’s not the last performance and you can go back to re-tape. If it’s a corporate conference on something important, chances are you’re screwed.
[Ron Lindeboom] “These are the tricks that a pro uses and they cost you time to cover your tracks when you were too cheap to do what you should have done in the first place.
Give ’em what they want or don’t charge them. I can’t say it any clearer.”
Yeah, I’m seeing that definitely it was a mistake posting in this forum. Goodbye.
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[walter biscardi] “In the world of professional videography and production, $1,400 is VERY inexpensive. At $8,000, the Sony EX-1 and EX-3 cameras are VERY inexpensive.”
To me, $1400 is very expensive, $8000 is out of the question. So we’re talking about different types of companies here. You’re comparing an events’ videographer to production companies with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, or should I say millions?. Perhaps this forum was intended for that type of company and I’m just wasting my time here because I just want to start my own very small business. Perhaps I should find a forum for people who are in a similar situation to mine and come back to this forum when hopefully several years from now I will have a production company and then the latest Sony holographic professional camera at $250,000 will seem like a cheap bargain to me.
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[Todd Terry] “It looks like Sebastian is simply not buying into that, and is not going to, and efforts to convince him of such are wasted breath. A never ending search for “whoops insurance,” or a “hey it wasn’t really my fault” clause in a contract.”
You obviously got me wrong. It’s not a matter of buying into anything. I do understand very well that even if in theory the technical malfunction is not your fault, the customer will always see it as your fault. Nobody has to convince that that’s the way it is. All I wanted to know was if there was some kind of waiver for these situations, or if you just sit there and hope the customer doesn’t sue you if the worst happens. And not that it will happen (again, I taped a two hour school play and didn’t have a single drop), but I simply like to know what to expect.
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[Ron Lindeboom] “If you are not giving the client what they wanted, then you have not given them what they hired you for. How can you charge for that? The work that you did that was wasted — as well as their time in hiring you and hoping that you would be a pro — it’s all a waste. Therefore, as many have said here, it’s not something that you should charge for. You didn’t do your job and you are the one that chose to fly without a safety net.”
This doesn’t answer my question. You taped a whole school play, your tape had a drop and you’re missing one second from it. Are you supposed to still edit the whole thing and just give it to the customer for free? Is that what normally happens? I would find it hard to believe that any events’ videographer would just give the customer the whole finished product for free because he’s missing one second of it because of a bad tape.
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[Ron Lindeboom] “you are NOT a professional if you do not take the steps to assure that this doesn’t happen — in this case, using a second camera to guarantee that it doesn’t happen — and if you don’t take the step, you are a hobbyist, nothing more.”
OK, let me ask you this. What if your first camera has a drop in a crucial place and your second camera chews the tape at the same time? I know I’m pushing it, that most likely that wouldn’t happen, but that was the point of my post, to talk about what happens when you take every possible step to prevent something going wrong and yet it happens.
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[Ron Lindeboom] “you just did not take the steps necessary to stay on top of it.”
I don’t agree with that. As I said, there’s a difference between not taking steps to prevent a failure, such as not making a backup of the footage, and things that are out of your control, such as a brand new professional tape that caused a drop out. I know it doesn’t matter to the customer one way or the other, but I don’t agree in that it’s always YOUR fault. You might take all the necessary steps, and still technology might fail, and there’s nothing you could’ve done better to prevent it.
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[John Baumchen] “If you want to greatly reduce the possibility of the video going south, go with a solid-state camera or use an external HDD to capture the video.”
Not a bad idea, but an expensive one. The hard drive Sony makes for my camera, HVR-DR60, is selling for $1400 now, and even if I could buy it, attaching it to the camera would probably make it even more uncomfortable than it already is. Given that I recently had a pinched nerve that affected my right upper body, I’d rather not put more weight on that camera since it’s rather heavy as it is.
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[Mark Suszko] “You can buy insurance, so you can pay the client back their money plus whatever they sue you for.”
That’s a good idea, but I wonder if any insurance company sells that type of insurance. If they do I could buy it, since most likely it would be cheap like renter’s insurance.