Alright so I went out for my first real test of taking some video and using my tripod setup.
There's a local race track here which had a Historic racing day on, so heaps of stupidly awesome old cars.
Being literally my first attempt at video it was more of a learning experience than having produced a decent quality video!
I found out a few things:
-Panning around 180+ degrees without any camera wobble on a fairly zoomed in shot is bloody difficult!
-The battery grip was great, I didnt even go through 2 of my 4 batteries all day.
-Having the 'sticks' style follow focus / zoom is a life saver. Can instantly adjust precisely without having to take my eyes off anything, very handy. Impossible to do more than one thing at a time though, like panning while zoom/focus pull or anything.
-Apeture settings worked best way different to anything I'd used for pictures. F12-16-18 seemed to give the best results, it's impossible to maintain a smaller depth of field on fast moving object. I think buying a laser range finder to find the minimum and maximum distances, then adjusting the apeture to suit the ML distances on the focus screen will be the best way to get the minimum apeture that ensures everything necessary is in focus.
-ISO 25 pink issue... I think a custom picture style will be the perfect solution for this problem, I might try put one together. Wish me luck!
Otherwise I've got an ND filter on order that should help here, should be able to have the desired settings at ISO 100.
-FPS settings - 60fps was only good for slowed down footage, as otherwise it gives the funny 'wheel rotating backwards' type effect on the settings I had. 24fps looked a bit jumpy, 30fps seemed just right.
-shutter speed - Still experimenting with this, obviously 60fps 359 degree shutter speed records for more of the time than 30fps 180 degrees, even though each individual frame has the same exposure length. Between 90-180 degrees at 30fps seemed best, but need to experiement a bit more. Higher shutter length gave a great sensation of speed on the panning shots, but compromised detail on the car as you'd expect.
-Using DSLR depth of field to overcome onsite disadvantages - At the start of the clip, I'm actually shooting from behind a chain link fence. However since I could adjust the DOF to exclude distance that the fence was at, it just looks like a bit of a greyish blur rather than distracting too much from the cars etc.
Obviously it's not ideal shooting through a fence, but sometimes it needs to happen, so its great to have the option of minimising the disadvantage here!
-My tripod/rig setup still has a few wobbles in it, and a few screws slowly wound loose over the course of the day. So improvements are being made to make it a bit tighter, and using spring washers to avoid things coming loose again.
-Digital zoom - This is freaken sweet, so useful! Some shots I wanted to zoom in more without having to fluff around readjusting focus etc, especially so when my lense (kit 55-250) changes apeture with zoom, so you need to recalibrate a few things.
Being able to adjust between two zoom settings nearly instantly was fantastic. The 55-250 has been my least used and least favourite lense, but it worked great for this.
-Whitebalance - Was struggling with this a bit, in the bright conditions it was a bit hard to adjust the white balance to suit, and I think when I went to the higher apeture numbers it was affecting this also a bit. Need more practice, and some better shade for the viewfinder. It's definitely different when you're out trying to film something and do all of these things as quickly as you can, compared to practicing getting it all perfect with no time pressure.
-Audio
I was pretty focused on trying to practice some panning shots etc, so didnt want to muck around with the audio.
Unfortunately no audio was recorded on the day, but no bother as I learnt a lot regardless.
I felt I had my hands full regardless trying to fine tune everything else anyway, so didnt need the distraction.
As I get better, and start to dial in which settings give the best look I want, I can concentrate more on these other things later on.
-Practice practice practice!
My footage was pretty dissapointing, mainly because of wobblyness, struggling to keep a car in the frame, and whitebalance/brightness.
I think aiming to make a 720p video, and filming a combination of 720p 60fps footage with the camera 'still' for slow motion, and 1080p 30fps footage of panning is probably going to be a great way to go about it.
For the panning shots I can have a little extra forgiveness by keeping the zoom a bit wider then cropping the 1080p down to 720 and motion track the car in post to make it smoother.
However the functionality that ML gives, (even though I made a hash of it) is amazing.
I'm stoked to have a camera that is currently well beyond my skill levels, I've got so much more scope for improvement before my camera is the bottleneck, if ever.
Anyway, a pretty hastily edited vid of my wobblycam footage is below.
