Video lust

posted by Jeff | Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 11:15 PM | comments: 2

I'm sure it wasn't in my financial best interest, but I ordered a much larger memory card for my HD camera. I'm not even going to say what it cost.

But the camera has seen a total of 60 hours of operation, and I'm reasonably certain that most of that was shooting in standard definition. Don't get me wrong, when you have three CCD's that are higher resolution than standard def being scaled down, you get awesome SD. But that wasn't really why I bought the camera.

So why did I buy it? Partly because I could and I missed having "real" video gear, partly because of my film aspirations (which I haven't pursued) and partly because I knew I could make some of the money back (and I did a little more than half). I loved the idea of going tapeless, too.

Then I got the urge to shoot this weekend, but want to do it in HD so I have something respectable to put on the Internets. But I also didn't want to be restricted to 16 minutes (at 720p/30). Thus, the desire for a bigger card. Now I'll be able to record a little over an hour. I can work with that. And hey, I really like the P2 platform, and with Panasonic heavily invested in it, it's not going anywhere. Future cameras will also support it. Maybe some day I can afford (and have use for) an HPX500, which can be had for under $15k with a lens and batteries.

So we'll see how it handles low light. They used the same camera a bit in Cloverfield, which is a lot of darkness, and a lot of stuff composited into the shots, so I feel pretty good about my chances. My only real technical complaint is that it's hard to get shallow depth of field, and the lens is obviously not interchangeable, but it doesn't matter much with the type of stuff I've used it for.


Comments

Joe

September 10, 2008, 3:32 AM #

Ever thought about the Red One? (www.red.com)

Jeff

September 10, 2008, 4:48 AM #

Yeah, if I had the coin, I'd go there in a heartbeat. Next year's Red Scarlet even... that looks really promising.


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