Yesterday marked my return to professional video production. I guess it would technically be the first time I've done anything like that for money in about seven years.
For the most part, things went really well. Because of the stuff I needed to buy to do it, my net profit on this particular gig is probably less than $200, but I guess it was never about the money anyway (says the guy bitching about that $10k on his business credit card to buy the gear). The HVX200 is a remarkable camera, and looking at the images I'm seriously impressed. The great lighting helped. I'm starting to really understand how to light outdoors.
The tapeless workflow needs some work. Basically, shooting 720/30p, I can shoot about 16 minutes before I need to dump the stuff off of the camera to the laptop. That process takes nearly 10 minutes to complete, and that's too long. There are a number of products that can help with that, but what we're really waiting for is some kind of Cardbus adapter to plug into the MacBook Pro so we can offload the P2 cards that way. Then it's just a matter of swapping them out as you go, recording on one while dumping out of the other one. (The MacBook Pro instead has an ExpressCard/34 slot).
Here's another thing I've learned... no matter what the subject matter is, corporate video is still boring as hell. I remember now why I only did it a couple of times in college. It's just not very sexy. But it does pay the bills, and if I can generate enough income to pay for half of this stuff, then it was a totally justified expense, as far as I'm concerned.
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