Inferno313 said:
Hey filmmaking Gaf! I'm going to be starting as a film student in the fall, and while I've worked on a couple class projects, and watched a ton of great movies recently, I haven't really put together any short films myself. I'd really love to put one together over the summer. I've got a Canon HV40 and a brand new 15" i7 macbook pro.
Right now, I've only got iMovie on it, which I've tried, and seems all right, but not something I can do really serious work with. I'm having trouble deciding what to do about editing software though, as I'll have access to iMac's with Final Cut Studio on them starting in the fall. I don't really want to buy an editing software that I'll only use for a little while, but I can't afford to buy my own copy of FCS right now. Any recommendations?
Get Final Cut Express. If you've got access to iMacs in college, particularly if they're reasonably new 27" ones, then you're going to end up doing pretty much all of your heavy editing on them, anyway. Final Cut Express is basically just a stripped down version of Final Cut Pro, which means it has exactly the same interface you'll use in college, and it'll be reasonably easy to transfer projects between the two. Being a lot cheaper, it obviously doesn't have the same sort of feature set as FCP, but it'll cover the fundamentals while you're on the road, and let you transfer over to the iMacs easily enough to apply the finishing touches.
thatbox said:
I also don't understand why you think that larger sensors downsampling to 1080p cause aliasing or soft images - downsampling is precisely the way many antialiasing algorithms work.
DSLRs don't actually fully downscale the image, though, because there's no way their processors could handle it (even powerful desktop computers would have trouble downscaling a 21MP video to 1080p in real-time). What they do is skip a certain proportion of the lines, then downscale what's left. This isn't all bad, though, as they're still using a larger effective sensor area than all but the most expensive professional cinecams, so can produce very nice low-light videos. This is particularly true of the Nikon D3s, which has a full frame sensor, but with a lower resolution than the 5D MkII, so it doesn't have to skip as many lines and can use a larger effective sensor area.
This line-skipping can also result in the aliasing MetalAlien showed, but it's worth pointing out that this is pretty rare, and even then can be worked around 90% of the time. Sharpness isn't anything to worry about. There may be a small amount of potential blurring due to the compression applied on DSLRs, although Canon does use the same compression algorithm and bitrate as Blu-Ray films, so I can't imagine it will be visible to anyone but pixel-peepers.
The big coup for the DSLR manufacturers would be if they could create a dedicated video camera with a full frame sensor with a native resolution of 1920x1080 (or indeed 3840x2160, if they really want to compete with the likes of RED). This would allow for absolutely phenomenal low-light performance, and eliminate any problems that line-skipping can produce. Being focussed at the pro-video market, though, it would likely end up costing a lot more than the current crop of video-capable DSLRs.
Getting a DSLR or not is really a matter of what you want to achieve as a filmmaker, rather than any comparison of technical details. There are pros and cons either way, but all the most technically capable equipment in the world is no use if the person behind the camera doesn't have a vision for what they want to put up on the screen. If a DSLR fits that vision, then go with it, otherwise a more traditional videocamera will do you perfectly well too.
