2005 June 22nd
It’s over – Glastonbury 2005 has come to an end and what a festival it was. I arrived on site at 10:30am on friday morning, what greeted me was to worst weather in 35 years. A completly rain drenched festival. Me, always at work took off around the site with my trusty camera and captured some fantastic images of the devestation. As usual, I gained my pit access, we shot The White Stripes, The Killers, BabyShambles (Pete Doherty is a pillock), and interviewed Coldplay, as well as shooting them from the side of the Pyramid. Interviewed Emily Eavis and Then Michael on Sunday. Joe the Sculpter, Rob the owner of ‘Lost Vaugeness’, the freshest nicest coffee from ‘StrummerVille’, Kate Moss, Keira Knightley, Mrs Martin (Gwyneth), Keith Allen, the Greatest Satay Chicken from the backstage compound and the most burnt forearms ever. What a weekend, all I have to do now is wait for 07!
2005 June 21st
OK… So this morning I finally finished the Ron Fields Nutrition Site, been quite a while in the making, even with its very simple interface and content display. I like it, but then again I’m biased and I do have a soft spot for clean lines!
2005 June 20th
One of the beautiful things about this camera is the six assign buttons added, to these buttons you can ‘assign’ any menu function – so for example I have A1 set to WB + and A2 set to WB -, changing my white balance on the fly. Battery usage is quite simply great, on the larger batteries 367Mins is the max that I have had, this translates to around about 145Mins of usage if you consider all the time that your not using the camera. Tape format is a bit of a misnomer really, MiniDV | DVCam | HDV. You can record in any format from those above but the recommendation is a tape per type eg. DVCam on DVCam tapes, but I don’t see any reason why you can’t capture HDV on to MiniDV, the tape format is the same. Obviously focusing is important in any film, but more so in HiDef, get it wrong and you’ve got a piece of garbage. The HVR now has an ‘expanded focus’ button, when pressed it temporarily enlarges the view to 2x, enabling perfect focus. For the price this is a fantastic piece of kit, good weight, excellent image quality, good price and overall usability. 8/10. posted by irregular activity
2005 June 20th
I’ve been toying with this camera all weekend trying to get prepped for the shoot next weekend – what do I think? I think that in comparison to many camera’s I’ve tried this is an amazing piece of kit. The first thing that hit me was the weight balance, heavier than a PD150 or PDX, but balanced in such a way that it feels comfortable to shoot both high and low level. Shooting in 1080i the quality is eyepoppingly good, and with the ability to down convert to SD on the fly (via iLink), shoot in 50i / 60i, we finally have no need for separate cameras on our edits abroad. Of course I wanted to try out the ‘filmesque’ picture effect – CineFrame and Cinematone are the two options. Cineframe can drop the frame rate to 24 / 25 to simulate that filmic speed, couple this with Cinematone which is two distinct Gamma curves, on playback you get a piece of footage which is remarkably like film!
2005 June 17th
I know this is a bit of a ‘geeky’ post, but I love technology, especially technology that looks great and does the most fantastic job. My new toy a Sony HVR-Z1E. I will be playing with this at Glastonbury on the Shoot. It’s Black, Expensive + advanced – what more could you want in a HiDef Camera?
2005 June 16th
Well news just in, I’m off to the festival as a Hi-Def Cameraman, my second outing on HiDef for quite a while. Julien Temple is directing the ‘epic’ Glastonbury Feature Film and this is the forth year I’ve been down there. Roll on next weekend!
