The week before last I was intrigued by the idea of getting out and shooting video, and trying to raise the game a little in terms of production quality. I've got this great camera that I've mostly shot standard def with.
I was surfing around when I noticed I still had a P2 card on my Amazon wish list. They've come down so far in price since I bought mine a little over two years ago, where each of the two 4 gig cards I bought cost around $750. The reason they're so expensive compared to conventional memory is that they're actually four high speed SD-cards wired together in a RAID so they can sustain the 100 mbit stream of data coming to them without error. Most flash can't handle that. The DVCPRO HD cameras generate about 18 MB of data per second!
I tossed my hands in the air, said WTF, and got a 32 gig card. Now I can shoot 32 minutes of 1080p if I want, or 80 minutes of 720p at 24 fps (film speed). Honestly, anything more than two minutes of 1080p is insanely expensive to distribute over the Web at the moment, so the 720p/24 is pretty cool if you get the camera settings just right (more on that in a minute). With one of my 4 gig cards, I can shoot 90 minutes of 720p/24, which is more than plenty.
I also bought a shotgun mic for on-camera use, which I've meant to do since I bought it. The built-in mic picks up the noise of the zoom lens, which is completely annoying. That was easy to justify, because I knew I could also put the mic on a fish pole for use in shooting whatever fiction I eventually get to shooting.
So with the chance to shoot some real HD junk, I started to experiment with the many settings the camera offers, and landed on something that's fairly low noise, but with the robust color that I like. The only thing that I wasn't totally pleased with was the shutter speed, which defaults to 1/48, because it looks a little "stroby" at times. (Technically, the shutter is 180 degrees, because it measures it like a film camera, so that's exposing the image for half of the frame rate.) When I get around to shooting coasters, I think I'll try slow down the shutter to 1/24 and see how much blur that causes.
I did make one error though that I couldn't correct in a clean way, and that was not white balancing outside after shooting inside. On the first clip I posted, my subject is all red outside. I knew it at the time, but for whatever reason I didn't react. That was amateurish, and silly since it's something I've known better about since 1989.
Beyond that, I found a little vertical striping on a couple of very hot reflective edges in one thing that I shot, and I'm not sure I can explain where those are coming from. I think it's just the kind of thing I need to watch for when I'm not doing run-and-gun ENG-style shooting.
The near-fatal flaw of my camera is that it's not shoulder mounted. Back in the day, I could slug around a camera and shoot for hours on my shoulder, but this thing is killing me when I freehand it. Add to the weight of the camera my light and wireless rig, and it's damn near torture to carry. Anton Bauer makes this really cool device to mount cameras on that also uses their batteries (in part to counter balance), but has two issues. One is that it has no quick-release, so what happens if you want to put it on a tripod? Heck, how do you even set the camera down? The cost doesn't include buying into their battery system either, though I admit those are things I could use with a future camera. I think a decent solution is to get this video monopod that has had a couple of good reviews online and in magazines.
Of course, the thing I dream of owning is an HPX500, although that would be tough to justify. Aside from being shoulder mounted, the thing that turns me on about it most is that use of real, interchangeable glass, which means shallow depth of field, and big 2/3" sensors that mean significantly lower noise. And hey, I even have a ton of storage to use already! In reality though I wouldn't even consider getting one unless I knew for sure that I'd be doing some serious feature work, and obviously I need a script before I can do that.
I wrote a quick article on a QuickTime launching component for ASP.NET over on my tech blog, which was the first order of business prior to posting anything. I'm really happy with that part. I also modified my Flash player to no start downloading the video until you push play. I hate working in Flash because the coding half of it is not well thought out in how it interacts with other pieces (and the debugger completely blows). But I got it done.
One thing that fucked with me for hours is that your QT files have to be in a ready state for them to download correctly into the Flash or QT players, so you can play them after having a little data. I'm not sure if non-Pro QT works this way, but if you have the pro version (by default you do with Final Cut), it "remembers" where you last stopped. To get around that, I had to let the movie play to the end, click the backward skip button, and then save it. Then I had to upload those files. What a pain that was to figure out.
Anyway, the camera work is not great because of the arm fatigue, but I posted the first of a couple of clips on PointBuzz, starting with a Club Blood tour. The 720p version looks pretty good except for a couple of places where it's a little blown out. I'm happy enough with it I guess.
Great, I just got a warning e-mail from my host not being able to ping the box. That's not a good sign. I bet I'm saturating the pipe.