I managed to get my hands on the first upgrade for Rachel, my new camera.

Placed atop a small tripod in the hot shoe of my HV30 is a Rode VideoMic.

I'm taking a Sound and Post cIass in school and it prompted me to gather some new equipment for a couple reasons. First, I don't like renting from the school and dealing with the extremely harsh check-out conditions. And, secondly, because I want to use this bad boy on my own stuff whenever I want to!

I ordered a .45x wide angle today as well. The first thing I got for my old camera was a wide angle lens, so I figured I had to do as much for this one at least too. Next on the upgrade schedule is most likely a new tripod. The one I'm using now is actually meant for still photography and I need a good video tripod with a fluid head for smooth panning and tilting action. After that (hopefully around the holiday season) I'll try and take the plunge and get a 35mm adapter so I can get some shallow depth of field happening, as well as some radical manual focus. Then I'll probably have to get a rails system to mount it on as well as a new monitor for better focusing and perhaps a follow focus to further improve that. It's going to be an ongoing process, that's for sure.

Also got the new Typography project coming up. I have a little less than three weeks to work on it, so I need to get going. I ripped the audio I'm thinking of using this weekend from the film, O Brother, Where Art Thou -- although, I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this or not. It needs to be at least a minute and I'm sitting at 1:20 with this one.

As far as vidya games. I've been playing Lost Odyssey a bit, as well as some Rock Band 2, which Bort_Hammer and I managed to get a few days early. Everything else has been kept pretty light in favor of school and watching movies.

Update:
Here's a quick rundown of what the camera is capable of. Hopefully this will improve the more I fiddle with things -- I'm still merely an amateur at this stuff.


This is a screen cap from the video at different stages of post production. The first image is just the raw footage. As you can see it's extremely dark because I locked the aperture on the camera and didn't allow the camera to add gain to compensate for the low light. The result is underexposed but clean from noise, and it is fixable in Premiere by messing with some white input levels, as seen in the second image (which is from my initial test upload). Lastly I wasn't quite satisfied so I took the footage into After Effects and added some Film Magic Pro color grading which I messed around with to fit this clip. Typically the presets tend to have too much contrast for the stuff I've shot so far but I'm still working on it.

For a first test, I'm pretty pleased. It took a lot of work to even get this up and running. I'm just glad it's so much fun!

Now to finish these Backyard battles in Lost Odyssey! Just finished the Light cIass ones but I'm a little nervous about the Medium and Heavy cIasses...