All I want for Christmas
The AGDVX100a
I had several opportunities to buy one of these last year and I didn’t. When I was learning how to play guitar I received many valuable lessons that I have crossed over into other areas of my life. One of those lessons happened to be don’t buy an expensive guitar, buy a horribly cheap one. The reason being if you go out and buy an expensive one and then quit playing after 3 months, you just wasted a bunch of money and conversely if you are willing to play on a horribly rotten, pawn shop, Spanish classical for a year or two you are serious. Well after a year I have had a taste of indie movie making and I’m serious. I’m not a director of photography although I love framing shots. I have a basic miniDv at home I have been playing with and I have really just maxed out my use of it. Its time to upgrade. The AGDVX100A is the sequel to the AGDVX100 and the 100 is nothing to sneeze at. I’m no coinsurer but its my understanding that The anniversy party was shot on the 100 and the 100 was used on a movie in 04 that claimed the Sundance best cinematography award.
When I had my hands on the 100 from Nwfilmforum for Merlot everything was foreign I was turning to Eric, Trent, and Sten for help with everything. I had to mess around with the camera to try and discover the look I wanted and I only had one weekend. Luckily I rented it for a weekend one month before the shoot. Fast forward to Chaointe. I rent the camera again and drop it off at Erics house. Later I show up and lets just say he wasn’t putting it on a preset dial. He was trying to show me wav meters and all kinds of cool trickery but it all sounded like the engineer on Star Trek to me and that made me frustrated. So do I want to know all of those cool technical things because I want to be a cinematographer, no. I want to learn all of those things so I can communicate with one, plus have an understanding of the possibilities out there. When talking with Mark Shapiro I quickly knew just how little I knew. I think it is getting time for me to buy one of these and some more books.
On the other hand when the budget for lights and trucks comes into play one of these cameras costs about 2k and 2k can get you a lot for a shoot. Nicer lights more cranes, dollies etc. However at the end of the shoot you have no inventory and have to rent it all over again. Eventually if you were to take your rental money and slowly bought these items over time you would have all the equipment for lo budget shoots and no time constraints from the rental companies. Am I completely off in my logic here for getting one of these “my first indie” cameras?
posted by Morris @ 8:07 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
In short? Yes. To be fair they are spectacular cameras. We shot "Snow Day" with one and have used them almost exclusively for many projects in the last year and a half. The Anniversary Party wasn't shot with a DVX, I believe. Plus, you can't assume a movie that had so much name recognition signals a turning point for DV recognizability.
If you want to step up, rent. The DVX is a fine camera, and in some situations/stories can be a good choice. However, it's still DV and still has many of the limitations associated with the format. Plus, in about a month the HVX200 is coming out which offers full HD resolution courtesy of the DVCPRO HD format.
Still, like I said, if you want quality, rent. Even the new HVX is no match for the Varicam or CineAlta. And neither of those are capable of competing with 35MM. Save the $2-3k and use that money to hire a DP who owns a better cam or spend that money on rental for a better cam. You could get a lot of usage outta $2k!
Can you set the White Balance?
Can you set the black balance?
Can you manually set the shutter?
Can you manually set the Apreture?
Do you know the Relative ASA of the camera? if not can you find out?
How good are the optics?
Is the power zoom Varable speed?
Answer yes to all these questions and you have camera you can work with. The one we got from NWFF was pretty sweet though being a rental God knows how banged up it gets.
Secondary to that Decent Sticks a really good oil head that is removable and a High Hat and you can shoot just about anything.
You being essentially a producer / director I would probably advise against buying a camera and continuing to rent. Put the two grand inot a small grip / Lighting package for your shoots. It was sad that the peppers were so crappy from NWFF. We could have really made good use of em. But overall we were lucky to have what we did.
To Get Sans Vie right you will need to have the Grip/Electric package. Particularly on the interiors.
Man! I want a new toy and you guys have to go and make all this sense. Geeze. Ok, I guess for christmas I want. . .
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