dougspice
Veteran
Hey guys,
Just came back from shooting a movie in 24-hours for the Mayday movie contest this past weekend. Here's the movie:
http://www.maydayfilms.com/films/04_team-lower-gatsby.mov
On the whole, though, the experience was completely positive. Not having to capture tape was absolutely awesome and a huge time-saver. We shot DVCPRO50 to P2 (2 4gb cards) and transferred to my my MacBook Pro over firewire. Only once was this ever a problem, when we ended up having to shoot more footage for a scene than we had card capacity. Most of the time, we simply set the camera and laptop aside and they did their thing while we struck down lights for a location change, and lost no time whatsoever.
The only real problem was Final Cut's MXF to Quicktime conversion process, which sucked up a lot of disk space and prevented us from really being able to edit as we went. With a slightly larger crew we could have had an external drive and not had to worry about it, but as it was we just had to capture everything and wait. At one point we did have to delete our original footage, leaving only the converted Quicktimes, and we were all sort of biting our nails at that point. We did have them backed up earlier at a friend's house but knew there was no way we would have time to get back there that day if anything went wrong.
However, nothing did go wrong. The DVCPRO50 looks awesome, the camera held up well in all the situations we used it in (mostly interiors with a 1k, a 500w, and whatever desk lamps or whatever we could scrounge up). Our crew was 4 people most of the time, down to 3 when one left to go edit, and nobody had assigned roles (except me - I was default camera operator in addition to whatever else).
There are 14 other movies in the contest and most of them are also pretty good. I believe at least one of them was shot in HDV (or on an HDV camera in SD). The screening's soon so it'll be interesting to see how the crowd reacts to the strange mix of interpretations.
Just came back from shooting a movie in 24-hours for the Mayday movie contest this past weekend. Here's the movie:
http://www.maydayfilms.com/films/04_team-lower-gatsby.mov
On the whole, though, the experience was completely positive. Not having to capture tape was absolutely awesome and a huge time-saver. We shot DVCPRO50 to P2 (2 4gb cards) and transferred to my my MacBook Pro over firewire. Only once was this ever a problem, when we ended up having to shoot more footage for a scene than we had card capacity. Most of the time, we simply set the camera and laptop aside and they did their thing while we struck down lights for a location change, and lost no time whatsoever.
The only real problem was Final Cut's MXF to Quicktime conversion process, which sucked up a lot of disk space and prevented us from really being able to edit as we went. With a slightly larger crew we could have had an external drive and not had to worry about it, but as it was we just had to capture everything and wait. At one point we did have to delete our original footage, leaving only the converted Quicktimes, and we were all sort of biting our nails at that point. We did have them backed up earlier at a friend's house but knew there was no way we would have time to get back there that day if anything went wrong.
However, nothing did go wrong. The DVCPRO50 looks awesome, the camera held up well in all the situations we used it in (mostly interiors with a 1k, a 500w, and whatever desk lamps or whatever we could scrounge up). Our crew was 4 people most of the time, down to 3 when one left to go edit, and nobody had assigned roles (except me - I was default camera operator in addition to whatever else).
There are 14 other movies in the contest and most of them are also pretty good. I believe at least one of them was shot in HDV (or on an HDV camera in SD). The screening's soon so it'll be interesting to see how the crowd reacts to the strange mix of interpretations.
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