Equipment - tools of the trade: February 2006 Archives

Picked up via FreshHDV.com, Josh Oakhurst relates the story of Tommy D. -- a DP who tries out the new Panasonic HVX-200 with the P2 storage cards on a documentary shoot and manages to get into extreme hot water:

"3. But what do you do when the director wants to look at something, oh, four cards ago… Oh, you just hook up the P2 Store to your Mac and view them, right? Not with the P2 Viewer, as it’s only a PC product (?) now. Guess you’ll have to import them into FCP on your Mac.

4. Better have FCP 5.0.4. because 4.5 doesn’t give you a P2 import option. Ok, so say you have FCP 5.0.4, transferring this footage (ie, translating it into a QT takes time. By this time it’s pushing into lunch. Director’s focus has changed from wanting to see something from 4 cards ago, to wanting to *know* that the footage resides somewhere in that little black box of a P2 Store. Can you blame him?"

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This is a cautionary tale -- not of the Panasonic in particular, but of introducing a new workflow before you've had a chance to test it fully.

Instructables has step-by-step instructions on how to make your own LED light panel. While the author used it to make his own bike light, I'm thinking that this would also make a great camera-mount LED panel for camcorders. The most popular LED light panel goes for around $400, and it looks like this would only cost around $100.

Oren Grad writes about the rapidly disappearing Pentax SLR product line on TheOnlinePhotographer blog.