Today I went out to record more match moving footage around town, using the Black Magic 1080p monitor. By Jon’s suggestion I also booked out a video camera from media loans as well. This was in order to combat the rolling shutter issues we had last time. I am only able to book out Sony FS100s and the Panasonic 151. Knowing that the FS100 is a very heavy camera which is difficult to use hand held, I decided to use the 151, even though the quality would be worse. My hope was that the monitor would help with this. I also took out my Canon Eos 600D with me just in case, even though I knew the rolling shutter was an issue with DSLRs I wanted assurance just in case the 151 looked truly awful.

After getting back and looking at the footage however, I saw that something had gone very wrong. I don’t know why, but the footage from both cameras looked awful, worse than if I had just used the camera to record instead of the monitor. For some reason it looks like a screen recording, with even the screen displays being shown. Also the DSLR footage seems to have been shrunk down.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know a lot about compression or filming. I have looked into the difficulties we had last time and thought that I knew enough to solve that issue. Yet I have obviously done something very wrong here, but I just can’t figure out what. I went through all the settings on the monitor and tried different ones, and yet I couldn’t seem to get any result.

Obviously I am very disappointed in this, as it has wasted an entire day of production. Knowing that I am on a tight schedule right now, I am thinking that I will probably have to use the footage that was shot during Jon’s masterclass. My biggest fear right now is render times. I know from my test that 4 seconds of footage took more than 2 hours to complete. Within my final showreel, I dont see the rendered shot being much longer than that, as most of the reel will be break downs and turntables of my models. However, i’d much rather err on the side of caution.

If I am not able to film anything by the end of tomorrow (tuesday 12/12/17) then I will use the footage shot in the masterclass.