taylormade
06-24-2009, 10:45 PM
I’ve been shooting with a DVX100 for the last five years and have had great success with the camera. We just won the Best Film at the St. Louis 48 Hour Film Project for the second time and got nothing but compliments on the “film look” of our short. I love this camera in 24p!
Now we’re getting ready to shoot a low budget feature and HD is the only way to go. One of the places where I freelance has an HVX200A and I’ve shot some great stuff with it, but mostly SD footage. I plan on buying an HD camera for the feature shoot and had pretty much decided on an HVX200a as the way to go. Talking to some friends at the local rental house, they were positively gushing about the Sony EX 1 and urged me to take one out for a test shoot for free. Well, I wasn’t going to pass that up and I shot around town under varying conditions using the Sony and an HVX200a with the same set-up, 720/24P and 1080/24P.
The Sony footage was sharp as a tack, slick and shiny and colorful – and really video. The Panny gave me that film look I just love and when I showed the footage to some non-technical friends they all figured I was testing a video camera against some film I had shot. Sure, this stuff was straight out of the camera and I’m sure the Sony clips could be nicely “filmized” in post, but to my totally subjective eye, the HVX images were what I wanted to put up on the screen.
In my night footage with the Sony I had terrible strobing problems with street lamps thanks to the CMOS “rolling shutter” effect. Fast pans past vertical objects where just plain unacceptable in my opinion. The extra gain was there, but the Sony just isn’t going to work for my shooting style. And whoever designed the Sony must have the smallest hands on the planet, those controls are really small!
So, just when I figure the 200a is the hot ticket, I stumble across the HPX170. I don’t need the tape transport; it’s lighter and seems to give as good or better image with some nice features for feature work. I think the HPX170 will be my camera of choice – I just wish it had the LCD the Sony has!
Now we’re getting ready to shoot a low budget feature and HD is the only way to go. One of the places where I freelance has an HVX200A and I’ve shot some great stuff with it, but mostly SD footage. I plan on buying an HD camera for the feature shoot and had pretty much decided on an HVX200a as the way to go. Talking to some friends at the local rental house, they were positively gushing about the Sony EX 1 and urged me to take one out for a test shoot for free. Well, I wasn’t going to pass that up and I shot around town under varying conditions using the Sony and an HVX200a with the same set-up, 720/24P and 1080/24P.
The Sony footage was sharp as a tack, slick and shiny and colorful – and really video. The Panny gave me that film look I just love and when I showed the footage to some non-technical friends they all figured I was testing a video camera against some film I had shot. Sure, this stuff was straight out of the camera and I’m sure the Sony clips could be nicely “filmized” in post, but to my totally subjective eye, the HVX images were what I wanted to put up on the screen.
In my night footage with the Sony I had terrible strobing problems with street lamps thanks to the CMOS “rolling shutter” effect. Fast pans past vertical objects where just plain unacceptable in my opinion. The extra gain was there, but the Sony just isn’t going to work for my shooting style. And whoever designed the Sony must have the smallest hands on the planet, those controls are really small!
So, just when I figure the 200a is the hot ticket, I stumble across the HPX170. I don’t need the tape transport; it’s lighter and seems to give as good or better image with some nice features for feature work. I think the HPX170 will be my camera of choice – I just wish it had the LCD the Sony has!