Bolas Chinas was shot with a Panasonic DVX-100A camera, a very popular standard definition mini-DV camera. It actually has surprisingly good image quality, with very good color. With a little care, generally avoiding overexposure, it’s possible to get very nice results with it, which is probably why it’s become very popular with people doing low-budget movies, shorts, etc. Our director compared the quality to that of 16mm, which, while I think it’s a bit exaggerated, isn’t too far off, actually. The DVX-100A (or the newer, slightly improved DVX-100B) can be picked up for about 3500 dollars.

And now, I’m very excited about Panasonic releasing the HVX-200, basically a 16:9 native HD version of the same camera. It records to DVCPro HD format, the same as Panasonic’s amazing Varicam, although on a somewhat stupid flash memory based media, but I expect HD recording will be the way to go, and it does 720p and 1080i, in 24, 30, and 60 frames per second. It also has variable frame rate, which is totally awesome. It’s supposed to come out at the end of this month, at about 5900 dollars, and I’m thinking about investing in one, for my own projects, and for rental, since I’m going to be coming into a bit of money within the next few months. I’ll need to check quality and so on, of course, but if it’s relatively speaking as good value for money as the DVX-100A, it’s going to kick ass.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 4:30 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.