Guys in the Kitchen – Episode 1, Popcorn
It's geniuses at play. Well, almost.
It's actually just guys in the kitchen — which can be dangerous at times.
Dominic recently got a Canon EOS 7D, a dSLR which also happens to shoot full HD video. We've been wanting to do some tests with it to see whether or not we'll be able to use it on some paying projects we're working on. One of those projects is along the lines of a cooking show, so we had the brilliant idea of making our own cooking show for testing purposes.
Since Geno doesn't know how to cook anything other than popcorn, we thought we'd get him out of the way first. So, here's episode one, in which Geno explains how to make real popcorn. Not the dumb bagged microwave stuff.
First Shoot with a dSLR
Originally posted on Stembridge Mill
With the addition of video capabilities dSLRs, still photography cameras are becoming more and more popular for "guerilla" style filmmaking.
A couple nights ago, I had my first opportunity to use a dSLR to shoot video. I personally didn't do any shooting (because I was... acting... yes, I know, I know...), but I did get to edit the video we shot. We used Anthony DiMaria's Nikon D5000. It barely has any advanced settings for video — unlike Canon's 5D MKII, 7D, and the soon-to-come 1D MKIV, it's definitely not being catered to serious videographers.
We shot 720p HD, 24fps. The results from the camera were fairly decent. I was pleased with the general image we captured, and the camera's performance in low light levels. There were some issues, however.
While we didn't experience any of the "jello" effects that comes from the dSLR using a rolling shutter, there were other problems. The D5000 gives no control over auto-exposure. This means that whenever the camera moves or action happens in-frame, the camera automatically detects the light levels and adjusts the exposure to keep the image at a good level. To translate that to video camera terminology, it would be like leaving the auto iris on.
Auto iris (or exposure) is okay if you're shooting home movies. But it's a big no-no if you're trying to shoot anything that's supposed to have some quality. It just doesn't look good to have the light levels in the frame changing during shots. The especially bad thing with the D5000 and this is that the exposure changes aren't smooth; they're chunky incrementals.
The D5000's on-camera mic is pretty terrible, and there's no way to plug in external audio sources. So we're going to be completely re-recording the audio from our shoot. The only other problem we had, though minor, was that the camera records video to the AVI codec, which isn't a very good format. I had to render every clip in my Final Cut timeline before I could play it.
Learning from this shoot, here are a few things I would look for in a dSLR camera before buying/using it for video:
» Manual control over video settings
» Options to utilize external audio mics/devices
» Quality recording format
Here's a few screenshots from the video.
