Gear - A Turny Monitor Thingy (What Cam do I use and what for)

Hello World!

As you may have noticed the Headline starts with the word Gear. If you ask yourself why I´ll explain to you how I´ll build up this Blog.

There will be several categorys like:

Gear         (for all of my own Gear)
Updates    (Updates about my newest Projects)
News        (News from the World of Filmmaking - These News will usually be taken from other sites)
Technique (I show you Techniques I use for filmmaking and share mistakes  I made with solutions)
Storys       (If anything Fun or Interesting happens with me I´ll write about it)

SO back to the topic :

Every low-Budget Cinematographer´s first queation is what cam to use for his first movies and if he should rent or buy a camera.

I bought myself a canon 600D for the following reasons:

-It´s not only a good cam for video but also for photography so you basically get a 2in1 offer.
-The image quality of both video/photography is superb

But why a DSLR?

There are several reason to use a DSLR for low-Budget filmmaking.

-The most important reason to use a DSLR is that you have full control over your exposure,shutter speed, Iso, white balance. This manual options are really important for high quality filming . Why?

Light one half of your room and keep the other half as dark  as possible. If you use a regular camcorder without manual control over it´s functions you´ll notice some kind of unnatural jump of light in the image. This can only be avoided by having manual control over youre functions.

- A DSLR also comes with a large Sensor which means more Detail for your movie better low-light capacity (you basically can film darker images then with a small sensor cam without any quality losses), and a good Depth of Field (VERY IMPORTANT FOR STORY TELLING!!!)

-And  last but not least a DSLR hase changable lenses which means that  you can cover a variety of focal lengths that you couldn´t with a cam with a fixed lens

But why did you Buy the 600D and  not other models of Canon or another Brand?

I bought the 600D because it has nearly the same sensor as the Canon 7D ; 60D etc but for a much smaller price. I didn´t buy the 5D Mark II (Mark III wasn´t out yet at that time) because a full frame cam is very expensive on it´s own and also usually needs more expensive lenses.I also thought that the 100€ price difference to  the 550D would be worth the turning screen (and it really was I NEVER had regretted the investment of this 100 bucks)

I didn´t buy a Nikon or a Sony (if you consider Sony as a real competitor in the camera market) because back then they had an inferior video codec compared to canon (which has been fixed by now) 

Here are some Testshots I threw together (don´t expect anything special here it´s just raw footage with a little bit of commentary)

http://youtu.be/uhfNyXWT-c0 

These Are My reasons for buying a Canon 600D. I know some of you´ll probably dissagree with me on some points but this cam is one of the few investments mad in my life that I NEVER regretted even for a minute



Giora Khen