Shooting Doc/Travel program and need some advice

F

fishcough

Member
This if my first documentary. We have our shooting script, interviews lined up, and our schedule. We're running a couple of weeks of practice before we go and my lack of technical knowledge is starting to show....

I'm not sure what we're going to do with the end product. We've had a lot of interest expressed in the topic but are funding it ourselves. I want to be ready for anything that could come (HD broadcast, DVD, web only, no idea), so my plan was to shoot it at the highest quality I have available (shooting on an XF100) which would be, I believe, 50 Mbps 4:2:2 1920x1080. The xf100 is MPEG-2. The plan now, since we're using a nikon d7000 as a b-cam, would be to shoot at 24p.

The thinking is if somehow this were bought for broadcast, the highest quality would be close enough to "broadcast quality" (whatever that is these days), and if we needed to scale down for another use, that option would be available too.

I'm getting a bit concerned about storage space since I'm going to try to get one or two hours a day worth of footage on a 1TB drive (shooting over 26 days, my calculations tell me I can get about 48 hours at this level). Is the 50 Mbps overkill? Could I get by for "broadcast" at 35 Mbps 4:2:0?

Anything else I'm missing? Thanks.
 
Anybody else know the answer to this? I may be in the same situation shortly and was wondering about this too.
 
I would always use the best codec you can...in your case 50Mbs 4:2:2. More headroom for CC and green screen if necessary.
Hard drives are cheap these days (Example: WD Caviar Blacks are around $80-90 per TB). Also, if you plan to transcode to an intermediate format (Cineform, etc.), your file sizes will be a lot larger.
Can't have too much hard drive space :)
Hope this helps,
Ken
 
Although I do not have experience with broadcast production, yet, I would shoot it on 30p instead of 24p because NTSC is 30fps. It does not look that much different from 24p.

Other than that shoot the best possible quality your cam can crank out. Storage is cheap. Very cheap. I just bought a 1.5 terabyte drive for $180. I'd hate for you to be arbitrarily denied a broadcast deal because you "didn't have enough storage space" because 50mb/s would have eaten up too much space. Relative to the past 10 years, you would have spent well over $500 per 48 hours of footage on miniDVs.

Just so you know, most docu-series(reality TV)/feature docs shoot over 100 hours of footage per hour on the finished product, I've even heard of 250-400 hours. For my next doc, I am expecting to have over 500-700 hours of footage for 45 days of shooting.

Good luck!
 
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