hi there. i'm a college student from India. i came across this forum recently and it seems to be a good place to ask for a few tips regarding a short film that i'm planning to shoot starting tomorrow. i'm more of a director/editor than a videographer so please bear with me on some questions that could seem silly :)

i'll be shooting at 50i with a PAL Panasonic GS-150. i know it's not the best camera around but it's the only one i currently have access to. what are my options when it comes to making the movie look as good as possible? i'm not really trying to achieve a complete 'film look' but i would like to avoid the generic video look as well. i will be paying a lot of attention to my lighting setups. in terms of colour correction, i'm happy with the filters i used on test clips but they still have the super smooth motion of video. is there anyway i can get the motion to look more like film? i'm making this for a local contest and one of the requisites is for me to submit my film as a PAL DVD. does this mean my final output will have to stay at 50i or can i de-interlace to 25p. i tried the 'film look motion clarity signature' tutorial from the articles section and i was really happy with the results. however, my process involved going from 50i to 25p instead of from 60i to 24p as per the article. can i use this process when my final medium will be PAL DVD? in other words, can i encode 25p video as a 50i DVD to be played on regular PAL TV's?

my final question is camera specific. would anyone recommend the 16:9 mode on the GS-150?

thanks in advance.

GS 150 is a 4:3 regular DV, as I recall, the same as my 120. Of course mine is not PAL. I have used the 16:9 feature, but I think all that really occurs is a crop of the 4:3 format. So you will actally have less pixels to work with. Still, 16:9 will give that film look. So, too, will deinterlacing to 25p. I understand you should try to shoot everything at 1/50 shutter speed to get a clean deinterlace. Pre test all of this to find the right combination to get the look you want. Also, turn EIS off for better picture quality.

Like a lot of consumer/prosumer cameras, the 16x9 mode on the GS150 just letterboxes the image. So in effect, it's applying a 16x9 mask on the CCDs.

Some people like to shoot it letterboxed in camera (i.e. turn on the 16x9 mode) and others (like myself) like to apply the mask in post.

Reasons for 16x9 in camera:
- supposedly easier on the compression algorithm b/c the letterbox is cake to compress (saw this posted, don't know how true it is - don't know camera internals)
- you get what you frame in camera (no need to carefully frame for 16x9 on a 4x3 viewfinder)
- one less step to do in post

Reasons for 16x9 mask in post:
- ability to adjust the 16x9 mask in case you have to (boom dips into frame, etc)

Sorry, I don't know enough about de-interlacing to talk about going from 50i to 25p. However, I will say that one of the most effective ways to make your video look good is to light the scenes. Most videos end up looking like home videos because the filmmakers don't take the time to light!