New additions

With the recent spate of videos (and more to come!), I’ve added a couple of new items to the lineup, which in one way gets me back to where I was a few years ago.

Back then, I was recording on 2 cameras simultaneously (sometimes even a third), which gave me a lot of options for editing. They were tape-based cameras, so they were generating a lot of tapes for storage (not that a miniDV tape takes up a lot of room), but the transfer time was horrendous (having to be done in real-time), and so an hour of recorded footage would take 2-3 hours just to get it into the computer to edit.

Those cameras have died along the way (another consequence of physical mechanisms, and modern quality), and so a couple of years or so ago, I went with the Canon HFS20, which is solid state, with both 32GB of onboard memory, as well as a couple of SD slots, which I primarily use with a 32GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDHC card.

That has been a great camera, so most recently I was looking for a second to add, and came across a very recent addition from Canon, the HFG30. Again, it uses 2 SD slots, so would fit straight into my current workflow, and it is a seriously spec’ed camera. So that is what is joining the lineup.

I seriously did look at a second SLR (or SLT in Sony’s case), but some initial tests were rather disappointing, with the camera overheating consistently during long recordings, making it too unreliable to be a serious solution. I know SLRs are now commonly used in the field for HD video, but they are (it seems) for short takes at best. I prefer to set the cameras up and recording without pauses, so the resulting footage is easy to edit, as it, and the audio tracks, remain in sync and don’t need to be rekeyed up each time a camera is stopped.

The other, minor addition, is a new lavalier mic. Rather than a wireless solution, this one plugs directly into the iPhone, and records to the Røde app. It is as much a backup recording, independent of the cameras (although I will have to remember to put the phone into airplane mode to stop those annoying calls interrupting the recording, let alone interrupting quality shed time!)

So that is the current news anyway. Been uncomfortably busy recently, thus the lack of posts. I did manage a little bit of shed time on Sunday, starting the build for the next magazine article.

Stu’s Shed TV is almost back on the air

Just placed an order for a new video camera to get Stu’s Shed TV back online.

I’ve decided on the Canon HFS 20, and it should be pretty impressive, and significantly improve my workload in producing a video.

Canon – because they still make exceptional products, and have very sound optics.

H – stands for High Definition

F – stands for flash.  Not in the lighting sense (although the camera has both a small flash and a small video light), but in the way video is stored in this camera.  Flash memory – in other words there are no moving parts in the video storage – it is all solid state.  It has 32GB of dual built-in memory, and can also take dual SDHC cards, which means the available memory can be tripled if desired. (SDHC cards can go to a maximum of 32GB each)  One massive advantage for me in this – speed of transferring the raw video into the computer.  With the digital tapes I was using, if I shot 60 minutes of video, it would take another 60 minutes to transfer it to the computer.  Solid state recording results in a computer file that can be transferred directly to the computer – no more video capture required (AWESOME!!!)

S – Not sure exactly what this adds, but it is definitely a much larger CMOS chip for the video chip – over 8MB vs 3MB for the HF 20.

Can’t wait!!!!