Tea & Wine Tasting with Gary, Kevin, and Jesse from jesse jacobs on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick video demo of the Square iPhone Payment System that I shot and edited last weekend with Kevin Rose. We used his Canon 5D Mark II for the shoot, and I was stunned with the results. It’s safe to say that I’ll be getting a HD DSLR very soon.

Today (Day 2) was completely different. I jumped in head first and started to edit next week’s TekZilla Dailies when Mau (one of the staff editors) came by and asked me to do some edits to this week’s Diggnation (#203).

The edits were quick and it didn’t take me long, but the second task was to censor out some nudity in one of the videos that Kevin and Alex discussed in the episode, this ended up being pretty tedious–requiring a lot of tracking and rendering.

Lastly, the guys just got confirmation that they’re doing a live Diggnation in New York on June 4th, and I created a quick info billboard in Motion with a VO from Alex that plays just before the episode starts.

The office/studio was really busy today because Kevin and Alex were shooting next week’s Diggnation in the studio (Kevin and Alex hung around the office, too which was cool!) And then at 5pm Kevin and Jay went live with the Digg Town-hall in the studio.

All in all a pretty productive day. I almost hate that I have the day off tomorrow because I was just starting to get into a rhythm; I wanted to stay in later to finish-up the Tekzilla dailies!

Thanks for following!

[audio:http://www.grahamhancock.net/media/SkyNextIntro.mp3]

Ease of use

Having used a DVX100B for the last three years I was a little worried about going to a new camera because I’ve literally just mastered the manual controls on the DVX. After about 5 minutes of shooting with the HMC my fears were gone. This camera handles exactly like a DVX, the controls are in generally the same locations on the camera body, and navigating the setup menus to customize my settings were very intuitive. As far as when shooting, after the first few moments of using the camera and getting used to it, I nearly forgot that I was using a brand new camera, everything was very familiar.

Workflow

Let me put this quite simply. I LOVE the workflow for this camera. You prep, you shoot, you transfer the footage and you edit and post. Gone are the days of Logging & Capturing in real time and waiting for hours and hours of footage to digitize. Instead, if you’re using Final Cut Pro, you’re using a different process called Log & Transfer. Log and Transfer lets you look at the clips that you’ve recorded (and here’s the best part) as individual clips. Every time you hit the record button you’re creating a new clip. No more making your own subclips or marking clips in a huge queue of footage.

Currently I’m letting Final Cut convert the AVCHD footage to Apple’s Pro Res 422 codec. The file sizes are quite large especially if the footage I’ve shot is in 60P, but I anticipated this and I’ve got a few spare 750GB hard drives waiting to be filled up with loads of HD footage.

Previews & Preferences

One of the biggest concerns I’m hearing from folks about the AVC format is that the footage is being compressed before it is put onto the SD card. So essentially when you’re shooting on the AVCHD format you never get a full-quality uncompressed master version of your footage to work with. I, too, was very concerned that the footage I would shoot with this camera would come out blocky and digital-looking and noticibly compressed. One of the last thoughts in my mind as I clicked ‘buy’ to purchase this camera was, “Surely Panasonic’s QA dept. wouldn’t let something out of the gate that produced shoddy footage.” I must say, my instincts about Panasonic’s QA standards have held very true. Of the footage that I’ve shot with this camera, the footage I get back from the camera looks just as good as any other digital footage I’ve worked with and I have zero complaints whatsoever. I’m not so concerned about working with a compressed format because honestly a lot of research has gone into making this compressed AVCHD codec look as good as it can possibly look.

Working with SD Cards

The main reason I jumped on this camera was because it shoots on cheap, and readily available SDHC cards. P2 cards for other HD cameras are a strong proprietary format, but they’re extremely expensive. As far as for SD cards, I found a great deal on SDHC Class 6 cards at NewEgg.com — 16GB cards for $40 each. I bought three and even found an awesome little case to keep them in. Three 16GB cards allows me to shoot about 330 minutes of HD video with the HMC.

Test Shots

The first footage I shot with the HMC-150 (720/24p):

Outside shots, late evening (720/24p):

Be Independent

Independent Film Fairy