a few HV20 questions

[cakewalkr7]

Hi. I'm new to the board and fairly new to my HV20 camera. I had a few questions that I hoped some of you could help me with.

1. We want to use this on occasion to shoot some footage similar to "the office" which means I'll be walking around with a steadycam rig and I need to attach a mic to the shoe at the top of the camera. I've done a bit of digging about what kind of mic to buy and what I've read says the native DM-50 mic isn't any good. There's a Sennheiser MKH-416 but that's too much for our budget. Is there another mic closer to the $500 area that would work well for this kind of shooting?

2. When I was first working with the camera I had set it up in HDV. Later I found out the deck we had won't recognize HDV footage so I set the camera to DV and it worked fine. Our output is only for web, so I'm thinking DV should be fine, right? Is the size determined by the setting so that DV=740 and HDV=1080? Anyway, another thing I noticed was that when I had the mode set to TV I could adjust the shutter speed. I've gone in to play with that a bit more and try to learn more about that and the aperture but the numbers that used to show up to the right of that setting are no longer there. I've tried to follow the directions in the manual but they suggest that the numbers will always be there and I don't see a way to pull them up. Any ideas?

3. And finally, some other kind of work we're using this camera for is for software demos for our web sites. So, with the camera I'll be shooting someone introducing our software and then in premiere, cut to some screen capture from camtasia (quicktime output @ 15fps). I just tried this for the first time yesterday and I'm not getting great results in premiere with the screen capture and I'm wondering if there's another way to mix the video and screen cap video? I know that's not completely hv20 related, but hopefully someone will have some ideas. Thanks.

Geoff

[SenorKaffee]

Maybe you can write more about "I'm not getting great results in premiere"? If your project is set to 30fps then 15fps should be fine.

[bluegrass]

1. If you have a project that you're shooting similiar to the TV show Office, than I assume you have a crew working with you on the shoot. Why not have someone operatate a boom mic. You could use any number of mics under $500 that should blow away anything you mount on the camera. I'd be connecting external mics through a mixer and on to your Beachtech or XLR PRo than in to the external mic in on the camera.

2. If you don't want to capture from the HV20 than I you would obvioulsy need an HDV deck. I personally wouldn't sacrifice HD shooting because I didn't have a deck that could capture HD. Even if your rendering for the WEB, I think you will see much better quality in the end if you shoot HD and render it down to whatever you want to push out on the WEB. Just a personal opinion. I think if you want to compare just the horizontal resolution of SD & HD it might be 740 & 14XX but I'm new to HD myself and get a little confused by the numbers. The difference in what the final results look like is of course the bottom line to be concerned with.

3. Like the previous reply. Need more info. I've never used Camtasia but maybe your RLE doesn't like inserting the Quicktime format. Maybe Camtasia can output a different format that would give you better looking results when inserting into your RLE project.