Hey All,
I’m leaving in two weeks to shoot documentary footage for a nonprofit in Haiti, and I’d reeeally appreciate it if you evaluated my current setup (below) and answered a couple questions.
About the trip: I’ll be with a group, but I’ll be solely responsible for the shooting/sound. The trip is five days long. We’ll have electricity access at least at our hotel (so every night) but not necessarily during day excursions. I’ll probably have to walk/carry all my stuff a lot, so staying light/compact/inconspicuous-ish would be great.

My Setup:
Panasonic GH2 with Hoodman LCD hood
Panasonic 14-140mm, SLR Magic 12mm, SMC Takumar 50mm
UV, Polaroid Vari ND filter, Tiffen Polarizer
4x Batteries (1 offbrand), 2 chargers, 6x 16gb Sandisks
Zoom H4N with rycote
Rode Videomic Pro with furry
Countryman Wired Lav
Panasonic over-ear headphones
Macbook Pro 13”
Manfrotto 561b monopod
SmallHD DP6
Lens cleaning kit, Gaff tape, some other mounting accessories and wires
Big nice Lowepro backpack to carry everything

A few questions:

1. Is the smallHD overkill? I have no compact way to mount both the SmallHD and Rode VMP simultaneously, so I may not really use the monitor and thus don’t want to carry it…I may or may not have just answered my own question.

2. My GH2 is currently hacked with the driftwood 176mbps GOP1. I typically shoot narrative shorts, and the hack has been great – I’ve only needed to restart the camera during a shoot once, and it took ~15 sec, so not a big deal. I would love to shoot the documentary hacked, but is that a really dangerous idea? Besides the stability issue, do you think its worth the exponentially more space it’ll take up on harddrives? Which brings me to my next question…

3. I know I need two harddrives (one for footage, one for backup). I really like Lacie Rugged HDs (the ones with orange rubber). What size do you think each should be (500gb, 1tb, 2tb..)? How many hours will I realistically be shooting each of the five days? Sorry if that’s not a question you can really answer, but I’m pretty new to docu shooting and don’t have a good sense of that…

4. I’m considering selling the countryman lav and zoom H4n to keep things simple – just go with RVMP mounted on the camera. Thoughts?

5. If anyone has shot a film like this in Haiti (or a place like it), any advice (film-related or not) would be great!

I’m really sorry for the long post and I promise I’ve been reading the Documentary and GH2 sections for months, I just had some lingering questions! Thanks for all your help!!

David