I wanted to go through the whole process with the Canon 500D and Adobe Premiere 4, and see what would come of it. The idea of this first experiment was just to learn the technical ropes. It was shot with the 30mm Sigma, and the camera was, as far as I could tell, setting the ASA it wanted, which moved all over the place. There is a lag after you take a shot before it goes back to capturing the movie. Whether this is true with the next Canon model, and whether there is any way of closing that gap, I don’t know. Not the worst thing in the world. The “freeze frames” which are a bit longer are actual digital cr2 files that I’ve run through Lightroom.
What else… Although I played with sound a lot, the main thing which is to do some explaining with voice over – that’s the one thing I haven’t tried yet. I need to find what happened to the good microphone I had a few years ago. I think it’s buried in the loft. The camera itself doesn’t have a jack for a mike, though that doesn’t matter unless I were doing a street interview. The actual narration would be done with Premiere.
If you want 30 frames per second, then you shoot at 720p. (720 is the height). At 1080, it drops down to 20 fps. I haven’t tried that.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this was actually something of a real test in that I didn’t have any plans that Sunday. There was an early walk to the bagel store (I shot enough footage just there to do five minutes); and then a walk to the Met; and then I took a cab to the Apple store. Anyway – the next version will have voice-over. After that, I’ll start to figure out if I can actually walk around in movie mode, without killing my chance of taking a good shot. I say that because there are all sorts of things that I don’t understand about controlling settings for the “still shot” when the camera is in movie mode.
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