Sunday, June 10, 2012

Updates - Never Go Full Retard (How my partner and me shot a Modern Music Festival)

Hello World!

I just had my first paid job.

The task was pretty easy. I needed to shoot a modern classical concert without editing it or anything. I only needed to give the raw material to my client on the last day.

I could have shooten it alone but I still decided to split the money with a good friend and partner who was the second unit in this shooting.

Why?

The answer is simple. Shooting a project with only one DSLR (where you need continous shooting) is SUICIDE. The first big problem with DSLRs is that you have a 12 minute limitation (meaning that you need to restart the video after 12 minutes so that you have about 2-3 second holes in your footage. The secod problem is that pulling focus in dark places is hard if you have poor eyesight (like me).

These two problems can´t be entirely decimated but helped to overcome by using at least two DSLRs.

if you have two cams in use its no problem if one cam has issues (like the 12 minute limitation etc.) as long as the second cam is still running. The focus pulling issue is also solved by this because  two pairs of eyes always see better than one (obviously). The focus pulling issue can also be solved by the use of magic lantern (I will talk about magic lantern in a later blog topic).

Battery and memory management is also very important in projects like this. This was our setup:


We took turns overwriting  the sd cards to the computer and formating them afterwards. One issue we had was that the recharging time of the batterys  was about 20 minutes longer then the decharging (is that even a word lol) time of the batterys. Most fortunately we usually had pauses between artist etc. so that we always managed to have full batterys.

SO the rule to learn for "bigger" projects like this
 is to have good equipment managementand teamwork.



Here is a little teaser i made for you ;)