PRODUCTION JOURNAL

I feel like a kid in a candy store. Today I dropped by the rental house and picked up all of the fancy HD equipment stuff we will be using for the movie. I've had the camera for a few weeks now, but I haven't been able to shoot any HD video with it, because I haven't had the P2 cards. I spent about an hour at Zacuto Rentals making sure I knew how to use the stuff before I took it home for the weekend. My friend Joe Dejulius showed me the ropes and helped me load it up. Steve Weiss and everyone at Zacuto has really been down for the cause and they have given me a lot of help on recent projects, so go support them and rent their stuff!



The workflow is a bit complicated, and sort of terrifying, but after a few hours of messing around, I feel like I have the hang of it. The name of the game with tapeless HD seems to be redundancy. I need to have as many backups of these files as possible, to make sure nothing disappears or gets corrupted. All of the equipment seems a bit touchy, and there are definitely right and wrong ways to do things, so I'll need to read up and make sure I've got it all in order.



For now, I'm just totally blown away by the quality. The footage looks incredible. Even the crap looks nice. I was doing some tests as the sun went down, and I'm really excited about the capabilities of the camera. These are really powerful tools for indie filmmakers. This little camera and these little cards are making me all giddy!