New toys! LMV goes High Def!

Our video production company, Look Mom Videos, (we film weddings, dance recitals, and marching band competitions all over the south) is making the move to High-Definition! Our first Canon XH-A1 video camera arrived Monday after noon at our Nashville office. Shane brought it down today and we took it out to the WVNN listener lunch (free and delicious!) at Big Spring Park in Huntsville.

Initial impressions are the camera is heavy! The zoom is amazing! The picture looked really good! It was hard to tell because it was in the viewfinder, but it looked sweet. I'm going to hook it up to our 62" HDTV later and check it out.

There are a ton of buttons and switches on it, which I have no idea what they do. The manual is 165 pages... so I'll be doing a lot of reading. (Got the PDF version too so I can read it on the laptop when I'm out and about too.)

We've already run some tests with Adobe Production Studio CS2, and it really isn't made to export HDV. So, that means we're going to get the CS3 version.

Of course, with HDV comes an increase in prices. HDV tapes (60 min) are about $8/each! So you figure a wedding we normally use 5 tapes = $40.00, compared to the current price of 5 x $2.50 = $12.50. Plus an increase editing time, because rendering is slow. The resolution is 1440x1080 (1,555,200) vs 720x480 (345,600)... or roughly 4.5 times more information to deal with! Prices must go up. Fortunately, the data transfer rate is the same 25 MB/sec, so all our Hard Drives should be adequate to handle the files (About 1 TB of space).

Here's a couple pics I took tonight.