HD For Indies

BTW, nice slanted story. Use the the FX1, yeah right! It's a good camera however it's not in the same league as the HVX200. It was the final nail, when I watched the videos, and it ended with a text overlay of P2 Full at the end. Biased crap like this is disgusting.

Buy three p2 cards for 1,500 and a cheapo powerbook like last years b stock for sub 1K and dump to that. Easy.

Also, less complaining and more filming. That's the problem with our generation. We have it better than any other generation has since the city of Atlantis; so we complain about what we don't have instead of making the best out of what we do have. I'm guilty of this too, however I'm trying to change that mind set of our generation.......
 

Mike is totally right. If you've buying something that goes out of date as quickly as a HD camera, then you would be crazy not to spend 2%-5% of that amount on making sure you can get something that fits your workflow.

If you buy a package that DOESN'T WORK, and it takes you two months to get the pieces together that you need to get a workflow going, then you are:
a) losing money because you could have invested the $10,000 or so you that you just spent for those 2 months
b) losing money because your camera is going out of date while it sits on the shelf
c) losing a lot of money if you bought the wrong thing and now have to either sell it or buy some additional over-priced thing to make it work with your workflow

Also, reading hdforindies is great for postponing buy-lust because he tells about all of the cool stuff (silicon image, red, etc) that you should save your money for. And when the Red is out, you know he'll have the scoop on the Red 2, with optical viewfinder, less-noisy 4k, etc. So then you'll save your money more and be sensible and RENT.

Till then, indies, work on your scripts. And if you have to buy something, buy something that won't go out of date. Like a light. Or a reflector board. Or a great microphone. Future-proof for SD, HD, 4k, even 3-D 8k.

Tirade done. Now I am back to writing music video treatments.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 

Anonymous - I think you missed Josh's point - the guy didn't HAVE the extra $2500 for P2 cards and laptop. $10K was IT. And personally, I'd have recommended Z1U over FX1 (50i option as well as XLR inputs).

The overall point was don't blow your wad on acquisition, balance it out.

I thought a bit about it - you CAN edit DVCPRO HD on a laptop - get a MacBook/MacBook Pro, run FCS 5.1 (assuming the MacBook works right, which I haven't fully verified yet), max out RAM, get external HDs, plug in a second monitor. Then you have field and studio solutions. If _I_ were on a super tight budget, I'd go heavy on acquisition and light on post, but be prepared to FINISH post on a serious box. Offline editing is cake (can always downsample to DV if you needed to for offline).

-mike
 

I'd have recommended Z1U over FX1 (50i option as well as XLR inputs)

Why are you people obsessed with XLR input to terrible mp2 audio? Yes balanced audio still sounds crappy if it is mp2. The only thing I see the Z1U offering over the FX-1 is having "real" timecode...

--oKie
 

Okie - because if you ARE stuck with "terrible mp2 audio," don't you want best possible input into it? Or are you willing to live with unbalanced audio for source acquisition? Or would you rather deal with the hassles of two system sound? It's not ideal, but preferable.

Timecode good, but also see 50i rather than CineFrame, too.

-mike
 

Good story. Funny how the story is about taking care of the people stuff first and think about technical solutions later, yet the comments are about cameras and computers.

FWIW, my FX1 has real timecode. You can batch capture with Final Cut Pro. Unbalanced audio is a problem but since the FX1 accepts line level input you can do quite long runs with it. I routinely use 7 meter runs from mixer to my FX1 without interference yet.

Anyway, I'm guilty to the tech addiction too, I just don't pretend I'll ever get money out of learning how to make movies.
 

The big mistakes of low budget productions.

The big ones I see are people keep buying their cameras for shoots that don't need them. Sure if they are going to use it for other stuff then fine, but equipment purchases like that should be better left outside the budget I think.

Where I'm at its around 100-200 per day for a prosumer camera kit (XL2 with lens, etc). Thats $600 for 3 days would free up $9400 for lights, post, actors, food, audio equipment.

People make the mistake of not renting all the time. Heck even if you rented a F900 @ $1000 for a 3 day shoot you still have $7000 left over for everything plus getting the footage transfered to hard drives and do offline editing.

For the love of god, Give Mike some money people and talk to him!
 

MP2 audio doesn't sound as good as a CD does. CDs don't sound as good as good vinyl does. And then there's those 24bit super audio discs.

But guess what? The music industry learned that the kids of the world are utterly happy with MP3s. And MP3s kinda bite.

Right tool for the right job. MP2 is just fine for dialog unless you're shooting a big ol' feature film which will get theatrical distribution.

And there are not many people here doing that.

What's way worse than MP2 audio is a shitty soundman.

And a good DP can make a movie with a DVX100 that looks better than an amateur's Varicam.
 

Keith - good man, your check's in the mail.

: )

Pat - yeah, I agree, with the caveat that compressed can be acceptable for final deliverable (5.1 channel audio on your DVDs? Compressed!) but for acquisition, better is, like, you know, BETTER.

But yeah - talent is more important than gear. I was talking to someone the other day about budgets for color correction, and I said I'd rather have a skilled colorist work on the built in tools in FCP on a DV timeline than have an amateur (the moviemaker himself) do it with Final Touch or Color Finesse.
 

These kids today don't know how good they got it. $10K today? Geeeeze. You can do a ton.

I got my first feature in the can for $7K back in 1997. We shot 12,000 feet of 16mm on an Arri SR2 with a crew of six for 12 days. Ended up spending an additional $4K for processing and transfer (a timed one-light) to Beta SP. Editing was done on an Avid MC running 5.6 software (AVR 27) at night and on weekends at a small post house I did work for (no charge for that thank goodness).

Ended up getting a distro deal too on this little movie, so it can be done - and a lot easier today for sure.

Now a $1000 piece of software (i.e. FCP) does MORE than that $65K Avid did in 1997. Heck, today for $10K you can practically have your own damn studio!

-Blake
 

Blake - all true, but to quote Han Solo,

"Yeah kid, but could you fly it."

For the record, my all time favorite quote is his too:

"Sometimes I even amaze myself."
 

Got $20K for renting camera and post off-line, on line and color correction or I can buy a camera and a Mac for this and next features. This one like everyones We are gonna do got to be blown to 35mm, so.
1.- Starting for an HVX200. (the best one if I got to finished it in 35mm???)
2.- Macbook Pro 17" with FCP 5.1 Universal.
3.- 1 Terabyte Disk. Lacie???
4.- 1 23" Apple monitor.
5.- 1 Calibrating tube monitor for color correction on post.

Got some doubts:

0. This camera is 8bits and I don´t need a Kona2,3 or Blackmagicf for capturing. Just de FS-100 Firestore with a Firewire cable directly to the laptop (mac). Am I Right???
1. If I got the FS-100 FireStore Portable Recorder... do i need a P2 card too???
2. If I got a Macbook with FirmTek SATA ExpressCard/34 Host Adapter for MacBook Pro http://barefeats.com/hard71.html. Which disk are better??? Raid?? Just one Sata?? two sata???
3. Better a cheap Powerbook for monitoring on field to managing and moving files onto disks?? And a new QUAD G5 for off-line and ON-LINE without compresing?
3. If I got the Macbook, Do I need a DUAL or QUAD G5 to doing the On-line, rendering with some FXs and for compressing to DVDs, Beta SP and web??? (need an AJA card or something for converting digital to analog. For converting to Beta Digi need too.. Don`t I??
4.DVCPRO HD (720p24??? or 1080p24 ???)


PD1: Sorry my English.. I`m from Argentina. In this country we use the words Off line for software editing buy we use On line for sofware editing too but uncompressed. How do you call it??
PD2: Whatever I buy. All of you are invited for shooting in Argentina or for making a Co-production. Got rest of equipment for shooting. My name is Jorge Piwowarski and you can find me in google or another one.
PD3: Next week you can find our web page: www.mrfilms.com.ar, take note.
 

Mike-

How about this one from Han...

"Great kid, don't get cocky." :)

-Blake
 

Touché Blake!

The "can you fly it" was aimed at the noobz, not at you.

How goes/went your project? Email me and let me know.
 

I don't always agree with Master Oakhurst, but I'll say this:

At least with Josh you KNOW. He doesn't think 720p is professional. He's not all hot on P2. He's got no tolerance for what he sees as poor planning. And, oh, one whole hour of reading his weblog posts would make this clear to you.

Better to work with a mechanic who you know is biased against anything that doesn't have the word "Toyota" on it than wondering why, down the line, none of the stuff he's discussing seems to jibe with your experience driving your Cadillac around.

S'called researching of sources. Josh makes it easy and provides his info for free. Go read a trade rag where you have no idea either way and pay $4.95 for the privilege.