Thanks for the story, it was nice to read. I've been tempted a few times to dabble with video but I fear that I'd never be able to stop myself, and stills are expensive enough.
Dave On Apr 15, 2012, at 7:28 PM, Tim Bray wrote: > 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 > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
