Armed with my BMCC (EF), a bunch of Samyang lenses (14mm, 24mm, 35mm), a Canon 50mm/1.8, some cheap NDs and a (crappy) CAVision IR Filter, I set out to shoot a short 5 minute movie for the Swiss Hotel Film Award. It had to be shot in two days, fortunately they never said how long those two days can be... and they were long...
The whole thing was shot in RAW, I ended up with around 150'000 frames of footage using 750GB of disk space.
I learned a lot of things about the camera, my equipment, my workflow and myself. Some of the bigger things were:
- The camera has a really hard time with lower light conditions (i.e. a hallway with only practical lights). I knew it would need light, but I was surprised at how much (even using 1.4 lenses).
- Not having SSD capacity indicators was a constant source of worry, but preemtively switching to a new 480GB/512GB SSD every half day worked fine
- Some of the Sandisk SSDs had (rare) dropped frames. I lost about 2-3 takes to that. I'll probably stick to OCZ going forward...
- The display on the camera was really absolutely completely useless. What you see is definitely not what you get... (if you see it at all, i.e. as soon as we went outside)
- The Cavision IR filter was absolute crap. It did not prevent any serious contamination. The Formatt set I got after (*sigh*) the shoot works MUCH butter.
- My (cheap) Ebay-rig needs to go the way of the dodo... spending some real money on a new rig is definitely worth it (we spent way too much time fumbling around with the rig.
- I need to figure out a decent strategy for backup and archival. The BMCC footage of all the stuff I shot so far is in the 4-5TB range and I'm just starting, so having upwards of 10TB is probably a must (and that not being a RAID is not an option, I'm paranoid)...
- and many many more...
There's some behind the scenes stuff on Facebook (
https://www.facebook.com/adaysworkmovie).
It would be great if you could spend a minute to go to the contest website and, if you like it, vote for my entry by "solving" a captcha:
http://www.swisshotelfilmaward.ch/de/aw ... fav&id=256