HD cameras are wonderful, but to wrangle the best out of your camera there are a few things you should know before you start rolling.
We've reviewed the best best professional handheld cameras available. As you might have guessed, none of them are particularly easy to use if you’re used to an automatic point-and-shoot style video camera.
Get a photographer buddy to help you operate the camera, and a director of photography (DoP) to compose your shots. In the likely event that you don’t know a DoP, recruit somebody in interior design, a theatre technician, or a film buff with an appreciation of light.
The biggest trap that everybody falls into when recording HD is the focus setting. HD’s monumental pixel count means that the viewfinder can’t display a 1:1 image, making it hard to judge your focal point, which can result in soft images. Fortunately a simple in-camera trick can help you pick your focal point if you don’t have access to an HD field monitor.
When you have set your scene, add a Neutral Density (ND) filter to darken the image. The ND filter cuts the amount of light entering the lens so that you can perform the following steps. Open your iris to F2 or greater to increase the amount of light reaching the CCD. This will give you a very shallow depth of field. Use the magnifying feature on your camera and find focus on your talent’s eyes. Once you’re done, revert to your desired settings. As you close the iris, you’ll bring more of the image into focus while keeping the focal point centred on the eyes.
In the HDV world, good tapes are vital. The compression scheme breaks if there are too many errors on the tape, which cheap tapes have in spades. Too many errors and a dropout occurs, which means the loss of one frame in DV but the loss of up to 15 in HDV. I’ve seen random dropouts that have made me throw away otherwise perfectly good HDV takes because half a second of footage was missing. If you’re interested about why this happens, research the MPEG-2 GOP structure, but at the very least avoid the problem by using high quality tapes from the same manufacturer as your camera.
Please don’t forget about your audio! These cameras can capture dialogue acceptably when they’re close to an actor, but will pick up a lot of background noise too. You should use a boom and/or radio microphones for better results. They all end in the same XLR audio connectors that these cameras use and are simple to manage if you have a spare pair of hands on set. They will do wonders to your production.
Remember – you’re telling a story, so plan your shots. Draw storyboards – no matter how bad – so people around you know what’s in your head and what you want to create.
Have fun, good luck, and let me know how you go.
And please don’t stretch a ten second pub joke into a seven minute epic.