Niamh = Awesome
Monthly Archive for September, 2003
Yay! I won a firewire card on eBay! This brings my grand total Cost Of Making Movies to $573.50. This is not a trivial amount, but I would estimate the absolute lower bound for myself to get a decent digital setup working with my laptop to be around $400. And that’s with a significantly more limited camera and a no-name firewire card.
The only weakness of my current setup is battery life and the amount of MiniDV tape I have, which on both counts is not much. But my previous movie making experiences have been with my little Canon Digital Elph camera. Let’s compare:
| Then | Now |
| ~1 hr battery life | 1-2 hrs battery life |
| 1 battery. Have to wait while it charges. | 2 batteries. Can use camera while they charge |
| 20-30 second maximum clip length | 1 hr+ maximum clip length |
| Old home movie quality video | DVD quality video |
| Transfer movies wicked slow | Transfer movies wicked fast |
| Movies in some wierd Quicktime/AVI format | Movies come in raw DV format |
| Utterly incompatible with Linux | Should work great under linux |
The list goes on and on. So I’m pretty happy.
I think I’m having some sort of optical illusion with the new masthead. The previous one was a little off-kilter, like a photograph lying on the table. Now the new one is straight, but my brain is telling me it’s off-kilter in the opposite direction. Crazy.
So I finally broked down and bought a digital camcorder on eBay. I chose the Canon Optura 10. It’s got a much denser CCD than Sonys in a comparable price range and the picture is supposed to be beautiful. I really like the look of the photos that come out of Canon’s digital still cameras so I think the Optura is worth a try. My only real worry is that the picture is going to be really bad in low light. There is some testament to that on the internet and it makes sense–more pixels means less light per pixel. But what I like about this camera is that if I want to, I can just pull out a bunch of lamps and get a much more professional quality picture. With a lower quality CCD that picks up more light, I wouldn’t have that option.
Anyway, I just need a Firewire Card for my laptop and some video editing software for Linux and I should be on my way. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll have it by Thursday and I can take it down to PA and play with iMovie on Niamh’s iBook, but that’d be a stretch. Man, I can’t wait to see niamh.