superqix
2009 July 7th, 21:32
My film club invested in the HF SF-100 (obvious typo in the thread title), Jag 35, Shrig and dFocus to do the 48 hour film festival this year and I thought I'd write up some thoughts if you were thinking about a similar setup.
First thing first, the quality was way better than I expected. Here's the finished film... Check it out via the HD link, and this isn't nearly as good as the AVCHD render playing back on a 1080p screen.
YouTube - Braving McKinley Director's Cut
Pros
1) I will never go back to tape. We used two 16GB cards swapping throughout the day an loading footage was a piece of cake.
2) HDMI out to a cheap HD TV made for a great monitor. We also had a 7" SD monitor that we bought at Target for $129 as a second source. Some shots of the shrig rig in action are here...
http://www.whatsinitfortina.com/photos.html
3) Audio was better than expected. I only had a Audio-Technica ATR 55 mic with a mini-phono jack and a cheap extension cable on a mic stand pointed at the actors.
4) The Nikon lenses we so easy to focus on the rig that we ditched the dfocus early in the shoot. With more time I would have experimented more--but you'll see three or four decent focus pulls in the film.
5) 24p/1080i was easier to edit than I thought. A mid-range PC with Premiere handled it without a hickup (final export to DVD was an issue though...)
CONS
1) The Jag 35 stopped vibrating after 15 minutes into the shoot. After 45 minutes of trouble shooting we disconnected the power and used it as a static adapter and re-shot the opening sequence. The vibrating footage looked so good, I wish we would have bought another one as a backup--however we couldn't afford to have backup equipment for everything.
2) 24p to 30p conversion was shoddy at best. This film festival required a 720x480 30fps DVD with letterboxing. Next time I would have shot 720p at 30fps if DVD is the final output, would have saved us tons of time.
3) Sony Vegas rocks with AVCHD--too bad we chose Premiere Pro. The cheapo $80 version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum that I used for the directors cut handled the 1080p footage way better than Premiere or Final Cut. It's not fancy, but it was very fast for this kind of documentary style film.
4) Needed 2 more lenses. We should have had an 85MM lens for closeups and some sort of wide angle lens. We also had tons of trouble "locking" the lenses to the DOF adapter.
5) Power problems are killers. Whenever we plugged into wall socket and the monitors our "Empty" audio channel picked up AM radio. So we ran off battery power alot and needed a better soultion for batter swap.
That said--well under $2000 for lights, camera, lenses for a HD 35mm film-look solution isn't bad at all.
First thing first, the quality was way better than I expected. Here's the finished film... Check it out via the HD link, and this isn't nearly as good as the AVCHD render playing back on a 1080p screen.
YouTube - Braving McKinley Director's Cut
Pros
1) I will never go back to tape. We used two 16GB cards swapping throughout the day an loading footage was a piece of cake.
2) HDMI out to a cheap HD TV made for a great monitor. We also had a 7" SD monitor that we bought at Target for $129 as a second source. Some shots of the shrig rig in action are here...
http://www.whatsinitfortina.com/photos.html
3) Audio was better than expected. I only had a Audio-Technica ATR 55 mic with a mini-phono jack and a cheap extension cable on a mic stand pointed at the actors.
4) The Nikon lenses we so easy to focus on the rig that we ditched the dfocus early in the shoot. With more time I would have experimented more--but you'll see three or four decent focus pulls in the film.
5) 24p/1080i was easier to edit than I thought. A mid-range PC with Premiere handled it without a hickup (final export to DVD was an issue though...)
CONS
1) The Jag 35 stopped vibrating after 15 minutes into the shoot. After 45 minutes of trouble shooting we disconnected the power and used it as a static adapter and re-shot the opening sequence. The vibrating footage looked so good, I wish we would have bought another one as a backup--however we couldn't afford to have backup equipment for everything.
2) 24p to 30p conversion was shoddy at best. This film festival required a 720x480 30fps DVD with letterboxing. Next time I would have shot 720p at 30fps if DVD is the final output, would have saved us tons of time.
3) Sony Vegas rocks with AVCHD--too bad we chose Premiere Pro. The cheapo $80 version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum that I used for the directors cut handled the 1080p footage way better than Premiere or Final Cut. It's not fancy, but it was very fast for this kind of documentary style film.
4) Needed 2 more lenses. We should have had an 85MM lens for closeups and some sort of wide angle lens. We also had tons of trouble "locking" the lenses to the DOF adapter.
5) Power problems are killers. Whenever we plugged into wall socket and the monitors our "Empty" audio channel picked up AM radio. So we ran off battery power alot and needed a better soultion for batter swap.
That said--well under $2000 for lights, camera, lenses for a HD 35mm film-look solution isn't bad at all.