The Lone Shooter

I miss having my friend Mike with me on shoots. We were a great team. Mike took the stills and looked after the audio while I operated the camera. This year I have been filming on my own a lot. I feel like one of those one-man bands with a drum attached to my front and a drumstick rigged to my arm, harmonica at my lips, tambourines in between my knees and a horn on my belt. I often wonder if that's kind of how I look to people when I go out on shoots.

I find it tough to have to think about and monitor all the equipment myself. I've been interviewing people while having an ear bud placed in my ear to monitor for interfering background sounds. I am constantly scanning the camera viewer for proper headroom, noseroom, leadroom, light balance, tonal mergers and the audio v/u levels. My mic stand holds the boom now and I'm constantly checking it so that it's not in my shot, so that it's pointed in the right direction, so that it's not placed where someone will trip over it.

Over the next two months I will be flying solo to Boston, Vancouver and the U.K. to shoot my documentary. I'm having nightmares already of forgetting to white balance, charge my batteries, put a battery in the boom, plug my XLR in all the way, forgetting to check for stereo sound and failing to format my SDHC card properly. There's a lot that can go wrong on a shoot, especially when there's no one else looking out for you. Just as the airplane pilots will be doing before taking me away to shoot my doc, I'm going to follow a standard checklist. I'll post it once it's finished, though it's specific to my equipment set-up. Maybe I'll even have a story later on about how the checklist saved a shoot.

Music for Documentary Production

So I asked around to find a couple of good places for musical scoring of documentaries to save my time in compiling some huge list. DeWolfe out of the U.K. has some great tracks. I've been told Andy Quin is a favourite artist. The cost is 500 dollars for corporate videos and 50 dollars for student productions. Westar Music charges 59 dollars for corporate use of music tracks.

The Stock Footage Issue

If you've never looked at the price of stock footage before, you would be surprised by the varying prices and quality out there. Recently I was asked to do a corporate video that would feature some shots from news broadcasters mixed in with some transportation shots and archived shots. Here's what I found.
1. News footage is extremely expensive. A colleague told me that CTV is the least expensive. When I checked on-line I found that it costs a minimum of 100 dollars an hour in search fees and a minimum of 200 dollars an hour in transfer fees. For Educational non-broadcast (Internet-purposed) videos the footage is cheapest at 10 dollars a second with a 20 second minimum. It's 15 dollars a second for Educational broadcast TV. Home video is actually higher at 20 dollars a second. Corporate one-country fees are 25 dollars a second. Just for fun, I'll add in the cost for commercial promo spots. Viewed world-wide, the cost is 100 dollars a second. Here's the CTV rate card and again, I've been told this is the cheapest place to go for footage.

2. Although rights run out on older archived footage entering the public domain, it can be difficult to get a hold of the footage. You can go-online at the Internet Archive to find footage that has entered the public domain and can be used for free but it's difficult to search through their database for archived footage. I would suggest monitoring Miro for works that are constantly entering the public domain. As for obtaining archived footage for a fee I found a great shot of a Ford T model car at Getty Images for 700 dollars for use by corporate videos. Clearly, I will have to do more research in this area.

3. Royalty free footage comes in all kinds of qualities and prices. For the most part, you get what you pay for. Revostock has great SD footage for around 20 dollars and HD for 30 dollars. Corbis Motion has high quality shots that can get pricey. I found an F-16 fighter jet for 349 dollars. Productiontrax has some shots in the 10 dollar range (they also have audio tracks). Pond5 has over 325 000 shots starting at 5 dollars a shot and also carries sound effects and music tracks starting at 2 dollars. A Luna Blue has HD shots that start at 40 dollars and SD NTSC shots at 30. Artbeats has beautiful nature scenes and time lapses. The company charges a 30 dollar service fee on every order. My favourite site for anyone getting started in collecting royalty free shots is Footage Firm. They don't have a huge variety and seem to specialize in computer generated backgrounds but they often have free footage on their site. You can also get bulk shots on DVDs for reasonable prices. Another fairly reasonably priced site for footage is Apex Stock. Shutterstock does some interesting work with wide angle and fish eye lenses.
For even more links to stock footage suppliers, a fantastic site with lots of links is Stock Footage Online.

Affordable HD camera with audio input!

Could it be true? Is Canon releasing a true HD camera with a mic input? I can hear Comm Tech teachers across the province cheering already. I've rounded up some of the details I found on the release of the new Canon Vixia HF R100. The camera is due to arrive this month, though I've noticed several web stores are still taking advance orders for the camera. The cam sells for about 500 dollars U.S.
PC World did an article on the camera a short while ago.
The Vixia HF R100 records to an SDHC/SDXC slot and records in MPEG4-AVC/H.264. Like its higher-end cousins, the dual-storage-format R series camcorder offers the Relay Recording feature. It also employs manual controls and a mini input for mic and an output for headphones.
Here are some more specs for the HF R100.
Because of its one-chip CCD, the camera also works great in low-lighting conditions.