One thing I found and sometimes still find hard to put into perspective while doing research on the internet is people (neither incompetent nor evil) claiming certain things like camera X, light Y, microphone Z, …. is no good for serious filming and in many cases found that after finding out by trying it myself, the result was more than good enough for what I wanted to do. Many people tend to make these things a sport in forums and that certainly made it harder for me to find what’s really right for me.
I would like to encourage anyone doing this for fun (making a living off it is a whole different thing, that is not the topic of this site) to relax and find out for yourselves. E.g. if you have film material with one or more of the following:
- Noise
- Underexposed/overexposed areas
- Compression artefacts
Chances are, it can still be good enough for your final film and you are usually your toughest critic. My first experience having my first short film accepted at a film festival was that I was really worried because I had all of the above because I had shot the movie with the Panasonic GH1 (which has its weaknesses in low light) almost entirely in a dark underground parking lot with mostly available light and no firmware hack and I saw all the bad areas in my material which was of course more obvious on a big screen. End of the story was that many people liked the film and none of the people I talked to even noticed these things. It was quite the opposite, many said the quality had appeared great and very professional to them. Of course, people who were film professionals saw the problems but the main thing was that my perception of the quality was a lot worse than that of the target audience. The same was true for the sound, exclusively recorded using a microphone mounted on the camera with the “crappy” autogain microphone input of the GH1. Of course the overall result was by far not as good as that of a professional crew using professional equipment but people liked it and the equipment used was ridiculously cheap and I was a total beginner and learned a lot so the next film can have fewer of those defects. Don’t let the stuff you read scare you out of trying or drive you into buying unnecessarily expensive equipment!
Now, three years later, I have seen more and more projects where very cheap equipment was used to produce a lot of great-looking material even good enough to be shown on a big cinema screen as a commercial and that has assured me that I cannot be totally wrong with this. But I still enjoy reading every camera review by Philipp Bloom and fantasize about buying one of those more expensive ones some day and I probably will, but by then I will have had countless hours of fun making films with my supercheap equipment and I am quite sure, the experience and knowledge gained by that, will be applicable almost 100% to working with more expensive stuff.
Resolution
I began to relax as far as megapixel mania is concerned after having seen a student film, which was filmed in SD but with very good lighting, on a big cinema screen. I was sure this had to be HD but it wasn’t. If someone tells you, you have to shoot in Full HD to show your stuff on a big screen, I wouldn’t believe them. I think most viewers in your target audience wouldn’t be able to see the difference between a perfect 720 (1280×720) and 1080 (1920×1080) film projected onto a cinema screen, so I wouldn’t advise anyone to make an expensive decision because they’re afraid that 720 is too low-res.
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