merrick33

Look at the chest area of the guy wearing a striped shirt to the right of girl in shorts. You'll notice the stripes look weird and are morphing. It's referred to as aliasing as well.

Why We Are Thoroughly Embarrassed to Be Shooting Video with DSLRs canonfilmmakers.com

56 merrick33 16 years ago 20 comments

Comment · 16 years ago

I have a Canon 7d that takes beautiful video. I spent a fair amount of time learning to make beautiful videos with it, and I also spent a fair amount of money buying low light lenses, filters (vari nd filter), and still need to buy audio (zoom h4n), steadycam (zacuto) and follow focus gear. The thing is, I intend to make a documentary so I do want it to be as good as I can possibly make it so I will end up spending an additional $1k-2k on top of the camera body depending on the gear I end up going with.

Having said that, the target market for a cheap Canon DSLR (parents) with the stock lens and nothing more than a tripod should be very happy with the flexibility of carrying one camera for stills and video, and the results they get on video should be very close to a a similarly priced camcorder.

Here is an example of why. I was at a ballet recital on Saturday and a father was filming his daughter with a $900 Canon T2i camera on a tripod and his video will likely look better than on a comparable Canon camcorder because the light was not changing, his subject was at the same focal distance and his camera was mounted on a tripod. That eliminates almost all of the manual control variables that require more equipment except for one - audio. A $99 audio device can fix that if it matters to you.

On the flip side, the DSLR gives you full manual controls and the ability to shoot in low light with possibly a cheap $100 Canon 50mm f/1.8.

Here are two videos shot with DSLR's that can show you the range of these DSLR's:

Alexandra (1 camera body, lens, and monopod) http://vimeo.com/6854556

Salton Sea (1 camera body, lots of lenses and fancy equipment) http://vimeo.com/10314280

Video DSLR's will replace camcorders eventually. In the meantime they can be useful in that they take both stills and video, and etter yet they are the best thing that happened to independent film makers.

UPDATE: Another comments points to a post on Philip Bloom's site about which DSLR to purchase. Philips site is full of very helpful information, the Salton Sea video linked to above is his.

http://philipbloom.net/2010/06/06/whichdslr/

Comment · 16 years ago

I don't believe you watched the TED talk by Daniel Kahneman embedded in the blog post.

Daniel Kahneman mentions the 60k stat after his discussion and says "for Americans".

That should lead you to the conclusion that the number would likely be different if you did the gallup survey in a different country.