well, it was just a silly little story that we had fun with. Although on the day I had a streaming cold and it was hard going there for a while. Some of the shots are pretty poor but like I say, we had one day to get is all in the can!
Cheers Greg. If you want to do something like this yourself, get in touch with the local Am Drams and get something written, they love to do films, trust me!

I've been thinking about am drams for some time, but wasn't really sure about the best approach; this gives me food for thought, so thanks.

(And I think this short is better than maybe you think it is. Don't talk it down, it's really rather good.)

hmm, perfectionism is hard work… :-)

I've been involved in amateur theatre for twenty years or more and they're a friendly bunch and like to show off so getting them interested in doing a short is easy. It's winter show season so you could go along to a few plays/shows and note some names of good actors from the programme.

You can usually find them in the bar later, that much you can count on.

Oh, the other thing is, the actors are usually members of more than one society so you can get who you think are the best actors/most suitable from various societies. PEARL has actors from three different ones, but they all know each other as they've all been involved for years.

Interesting, I'll bear it in mind for a project in the new year. Watch this space... (but toilet breaks are OK.)

gee thanks… oops gotta go now…

I have some scripts here which didn't get chosen to be made if you want to peruse them… If you don't fancy writing your own that is. We can always get permission to use them if you like one of them.

Hi SB

I use MPEG streamclip and have just been experimenting with Apple HDV1080i50 at 1920x1080 and the file sizes are roughly similar to the TODs and pretty damn good quality.

Steve Mullen's HD7 Handbook is a pretty good companion to this camera. You can download it here

home.mindspring.com/~d-v-c/GZ-HD7.htm

and there's a good forum here with loads of help for everyone.

dvinfo.net/conf/mpg2-jvc-everio-gz-hd-series/

Steve Mullen recommended Apple INtermediate Codec at 1440x1080 but it makes huge files and I can't see any better quality myself

Hey SB

I'm fairly new to all this video malarkey myself and what I've discovered in my learning of the past year or so is that there's much more to it than just the file size, sensor size has more to do with image quality/resolution than file size and the quality of your lenses too. The only way to see best quality out of the cam is to stick an HDMI lead into an HD TV. Everything else is a compromise of file size/quality. You can work in great high quality codecs like Apple ProRes422 HQ but your file sizes would be ten times the size of HDV nearly and your hardware wouldn't be able to cope probably and then you'd still have to compress it quite a bit to get something you could use in the real world (ie uploading to vimeo)

I personally don't see any difference between the 1440 and the 1920. Steve Mullen, a chap who studies these kinds of things agrees but says that the diagonals are perhaps ever so slightly sharper at 1920. You really should download/buy his eBook, there's no secret to using the TOD files in FCP you either copy to your hard drive and convert them into somthing useable (1080i50/60) or whatever, or film in 1440CBR, make a playlist in the cam then 'capture' the footage as HDV like you would if you had a tape based HDV camera like a SONY A1. There is another way that STeve explains in his book that uses iMovie 08, but I haven't tried that because I don't have iMovie 08.

So, top and bottom of it is, don't sweat the 1920 or 1440 thing, the camera is excellent for a consumer camera especially in Manual mode, and so long as you are getting great pics, it doesn't matter what size the files are. In some ways, larger files just make problems for you.

Would it be easer if JVC had opted for a standard MPEG format? YES of course, but they went for a higher bitrate/better quality resolution with less compression on the file, which I think makes this a great little camera.

There are 'easy setups' for the JVC Everio for FCP somewhere on the net but I can't remember where. If I find it, I'll post the URL. These become available in your easy setups menu in FCP. They may help.

In fact I have the files here if you want to send me your email address, I'll just fling em over to you.

Hope all this helps

Avey

Nice one! I always find the HD7 works best in good light (Like most consumer cams) but more than that, it's the light that 'makes' the shot. All we can do is capture what Nature is doing and hopefully, capture it well.

Just one thing from what you write above is that when I stick a file on the timeline for the first time, if my sequence isn't set with the same codec, it asks me if I want to 'change the sequence settings to match the clip' I always say yes usually as this negates the need for rendering and can make a quick and dirty edit very easy to do.

Here, I can use the ProRes 422 Codec with my MacBook Pro 233 attached to a fast FW800 Terrabyte hard drive, but when it comes to using Magic Bullet Looks for grading, it just won't play. Says I haven't enough resources. poo. Otherwise I'd use it all the time from 1920 footage ProRes422 is recommended in another cool eBook I bought called 'The HD Survival Handbook' by Philip Hodgetts. He says it takes grading well, unlike HDV. Well, since I haven't enough resources, i doubt I'll be able to find out.

Look forward to seeing your stuff SB.