Feature length Movie

I'm four weeks into production on one right now. The camera's doing well but I hope the next time I shoot a feature it'll be on something that handles low-light better. We're on a shoestring budget and interiors have been rough since our lights aren't all that powerful. Otherwise, very pleased overall with the images I'm getting with the HV20 and SGpro.
 
Cool, What's the movie about? And what mode are you shooting in for for your interiors?
 
jaket said:
Is anyone out there working on a full length movie shot on the HV20?
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Not yet, but I'm knocking some ideas around. I'm thinking about using a DTE because of all we'd have to do to the footage. I'm using a 35 adapter so we're either going to have to shoot upside down of flip the image, not to mention I'm working on a G4 so importing is generally out of the question. The time it would take would be insane.

-Nate
 
I would strongly recommend the hardware LCD flip hack for the HV20/30. I believe Brevis has instructions and pictures on their forum, and there's a user who will do it for a small fee over on the HV20 forums (he also sells 35mm adapters). I went the second route because I had no interest in trying to figure out the inner workings of the HV20 and figured I'd probably just break something. Anyway, the flip is pretty elegant (a couple small switches on the top of your HV20, one for horizontal flip, the other for vertical) and it is a real life-saver even if you're planning on using an external LCD for shooting. I find that with peaking on, and a fairly wide aperture, I can do a good job focusing the HV20 on its built-in LCD. Wide shots with more depth of field are a much dicier proposition and you'd be well-advised to use something else for those (focus assist or higher-res LCD, follow-focus, etc).

I replied to jaket above via PM, but I'll paste my reply here in case anyone else is interested in reading:

I would say production has been somewhat of a mixed bag because of our lack of lighting resources (we're using pretty underpowered stuff, especially considering how much light the HV20 + 35mm adapter loses). I think if we were starting over from scratch again, I would tell the director either we budget enough to rent the necessary lights, or we shoot on the DVX + adapter (or HV20 without adapter). It's only the interior scenes that have given us trouble, though. The exteriors look awesome, and a lot of the movie does take place outside, so it's not all bad.

Definitely hope the Scarlet comes out in early 09. If I shoot another feature before then I will heavily consider using a different setup... you just lose so much light on the HV20. For interiors we've been shooting wide open on the 35mm lenses, wide open on the HV20, 1/24 shutter, and "Night Mode" which seems to buy an extra stop or so of light without introducing gain, but cannot manually white balance! Plus having to go into the menus to turn on zebra stripes/peaking (and not being able to have both at once) has also been kind of a drag.

Overall I don't regret using the HV20 + adapter combo on this because under good conditions, the results ARE amazing given the inexpensiveness of the setup. I think it'll be cool to show people what you can do with such a modest setup, and hopefully move onward and upward from there :)
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To just add to my reply, I should say that now that I'm starting to mess around with the footage in Color, I'm feeling a lot better about the low-light interiors than I did initially. For one thing, the combo performed a bit better than I initially gave it credit for, and secondly, Color can work relative wonders when it comes to adding power windows in secondaries to tweak lighting and so on. I still have to do some tests and see how the stuff will hold up at full-res (we're doing an offline edit in SD, then recapturing HDV and transcoding to ProRes for the final grade/output) but things seem promising for now.
 
Three 500 Watt work lights and some Gels from Home Depot could solve a lot of your lighting needs.

-Nate
 
We shot with dual-lamp Kino Flos and augmented with work lights. Believe me, it's the bare minimum - you can rate the HV20/SGpro combo at downwards of ISO 50 and that is wide open: f/1.4, 1/24 shutter, "Night" mode. That's not what I call controlling the look of the movie so much as holding on to our butts just hoping to get an image on the tape. For obvious reasons I would've preferred to shoot 1/48 on the shutter, and around f/4 on the SLR lens because wider apertures do show some vignetting, especially on the HV20, to say nothing of reduced sharpness and the super-shallow depth of field.

I wish it were as simple as a few worklights, but with this combo, you need some serious lighting power. It's one of the main weaknesses of a combo that is otherwise astonishingly good, given its low cost.
 
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Oedipax said:
I wish it were as simple as a few worklights, but with this combo, you need some serious lighting power. It's one of the main weaknesses of a combo that is otherwise astonishingly good, given its low cost.
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There are cost effective ways around this. Buy three (or as many as needed) clamp on lamps (about $26 a pop) and 3 500 Watt Tungsten bulbs. You may need to add a forth if this doesn't give you enough light but I can't imagine it not. You may want some 250 Watt bulbs on hand incase you get it too bright. Try this.

-Nate
 
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