My first experiment with video; I bought a Nikon D90 a while ago for shooting video and as a (relatively) compact back-up body and this is my first attempt. The few things I’ve learnt while making this video so far include; editing video is really (really) tedious, syncing the vocal track is a complete pain, and I really don’t like being on that side of the camera. Clearly I have a lot to learn but I really like the cinematographic quality that you can get with the new HD-SLR bodies and although I don’t plan to make anything too involved I am thinking about the potential to produce some short vignettes if and when time allows.
Looks great. Its nice and tight but not too choppy, the tempo is just right, you say everything you need to say and show a nice balance of you and your work. I’m far from being an expert but I think its superb.
Don’t know how the D90 saves the files but I assume from what you’ve mentioned in your post about syncing the sound there are two separate files? Does your editing software show a time code that you can marry up between sounds and footage at one point then take it from there?
Hope you do more of this sort of thing. Do you plan to do any behind the scenes videos of you working?
Thanks Andy. The Nikon D90 has an on-board mono mic which needless to say isn’t very good; I initially bought a Rode hotshoe mount mic which I thought I could plug straight into the camera body but the D90 does not have this function (the D300 and D3s do) so I returned the Rode mic and picked up a Zoom H2 instead. Ideally you use a clapperboard (or the budget option that I used; just clap hands) which gives a visual/sound cue to marry up the sound (I’m using Final Cut Pro) with the picture and then remove the clip’s original sound track. One issue with this is remembering to clap at the beginning of the take, but worse was that the sound was starting to drift towards the end of the clip (despite the sound being recorded in 16bit) which provided the biggest headache. Ultimately I compressed the duration of the sound clip to 99% (after some playing around with different durations) and this solved the problem. I’ve been thinking about behind the scenes videos for a while but they’re difficult to do in practice as ideally you need someone on-set that can work the camera and doesn’t have anything else to do…