This is kind of long and is about shooting video so if you’re in a hurry or don’t care you can stop reading now.
These new-fangled SLRs can shoot video, only I never had. The K-5 is said to do true 1080 which I gather is good. So I tried it and boy does it ever work. Sorry, this is kind of long and has no pictures. My boy is doing a big 7th-grade project about aboriginal hunting which had to have a “creative component”. He can't draw and can’t paint and isn’t mechanically gifted but he can act (has done so professionally) and write, so I suggested he write a story and do a dramatic reading on video. I really don’t understand video even a little bit but that seems to be OK. I set the kid up at the end of the dining room table and found a big of Ikea tea-lights in the basement, put 20 or so on on a pizza platter on the table right in front of him. I tried the Sigma 30mm/f1.4 up close but it just didn’t feel right, so I retreated to the other end of the table and used the 50-135. The bad news is that the video-mode autofocus totally didn’t work in the slightest with the 50-135 by candlelight. But since the camera wasn’t moving and neither was he, manual focus worked perfectly OK. Except for you’re focusing on the back lcd just like on a pocket cam, which felt weird. I have a pretty good Sony outboard stereo microphone from a previous life, and I discovered that you really need it to be pretty close to the action to get good sound. So I found an extension cable and propped it up on the empty Pentax 50-135 lens case right in front of him. I thought I should probably set the ISO high but once you're in video mode, it seems to want you not to bother your pretty little head about all that fine-tuning stuff; I touched the ISO button and got this nasty message about “YOU CAN’T DO THAT IN THIS MODE. PRESS OK TO CONTINUE”. Well OK then. So I pointed it at my son’s candlelit face and hit the shutter button and told him to take it away. We did three run-throughs of his four-minutes-ish story, and there’s this thing where you can only shoot a few minutes at a time, didn’t quite figure that out but it didn’t seem to get in the way. This filled more than half of a 16G SD card. Speaking of things I didn’t understand, there was a readout on the LCD that looked like a thermometer; was it warning me that the camera might melt down? I copied the AVI files off the SD card onto the nearest Mac and double-clicked on one and great flaming deities from all four cardinal directions, was it ever great. The flicker of the candlelight on that creamy 12-year-old skin, and its reflection in his big brown eyes, just jaw-dropping stuff. But it sort of went downhill from there. I had to turn it into a coherent movie, which meant dealing with video software. Which is hard to learn and hard to use and slow to run and then when you tell it to produce a playable movie, the .MOV files that come out never look as good as the .AVI files that went in. But they still look pretty good, especially considering they were made by a rank amateur. I suspect that if I invested a year or so in actually understanding all those Export settings on the video software it’d come out better. But I have to say that what came out knocked the audience dead. And I was shooting by pure candlelight, which I seem to recall was a major technology triumph when Kubrick did it on Barry Lyndon. Since I don’t post pix of my kids on the Internet you can’t see the video; is there the equivalent for video of Flickr’s only-share-this-with-a-designated-group? Hmf -T -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
