GL / XM assorted posts, 2003

[Graham Bernard]

Good question!

[Brandon White]

I am having a hard time deciding which camera to get. I plan on shooting short and feature films with the camera. I am leaning toward the PD100A (DVCAM, XLR adaptor, wide angel lens) but the GL-2 sound very good also. any help from people who have used these cameras would be great.


thanks,
brandon

[Ahmad Humeid]

I just came back recently from a business trip to Dubai/United Areb Emirates. While there, I went shopping for some lighting stands and a bag for my Canon XM2.

On my XM2 the WD-58H adapter (with hood) and the large battery pack are almost always attached. So I wanted a bag that's big enough.

The place where I was shopping didn't have much variety, but it was still heaven for me as I am based in Amman, Jordan, where, sadly, professional photo and video equipment/accessories are very hard to get by.

At first a Lowepro bag caught my eye (I am not sure which model). Then I noticed a bag from a company which I never heard of (Jenova) which was almost exactly the same size as the Lowepro, had very similar arrangement of pockets and seemed well padded.

Now I am new to all this stuff and I was in a rush. But a quick comparison and a look at the price tag convinced me to take the Jenova! It was almost 50% the price.

THe Lowepro bag looked much cooler (mainly becaise of it's color and "nicer" fabric) but for me, the price of the Jenova was very attractive.

It comes with a large assortemnt of velcro deviders, has a pretty hard shell and was large enough to take my camera with its accessories. It can be used as shoulder bage, backpack and waist pack.

Jenova turned out to be a Hong Kong based company. I was not able to find any resellers for them in the US.

Here is a link to the specs of my bag:
http://www.jenova.com.hk/diyhp/4053/xml/home.jsp

Has anyone else heard of this company?

Ahmad

[Jack Robertson]

There are advantages and disadvantages of an over cast day... An over cast day will have light everywhere evenly with no shadows... which is good in some situations, but everything is flat due to the light being even everywhere which is obvisouly not good in certain situations.

It really depends on what you want to shoot.

Jack

[Bud Kuenzli]

some things to consider. put up a large dark tarp or hang a large dark cloth to create negative lighting. Adding a large white sheet to bounce the existing light does very little, but a large dark sheet will cut down on the light from one side which may provide some minor directionality to the light. You can also use a split neutral density filter that is only dark across the top. That only works if your horizon is fairly straight but it can be useful in some limited situations. use light clothing and deemphasize dark skins so as to limit the contrast ratio. I've never had to do a planned shoot on an overcast day so these are simply things that come to mind; perhaps somebody with experience can provide real world answers.

[Paul Broyles]

I haven't used my GL-2 for anything in a long time. This afternoon, I decided to start editing some scenes for a tape I'm giving to some friends as a gift. I'm notoriously bad about labelling taes, so I knew I'd have to see what was on each of the stack of tapes I had in order to find the footage I needed.

The first tape I put in had my girlfriend and I giving a Christmas gift to my mother. The next couple I put in were blank. I kept putting in tapes, and they kept playing back as blank. I didn't think I had that many blank tapes lying around, so I put in a tape I knew for sure had something on it. It played as blank too! (I did try winding through to see if I was just in the rong part of the tape.) In a fit of desparation, certain that through some bizarre accident all my tapes had been erased, I put the tape of the Christmas present back in the camcorder and played it. It was blank too this time!

I've tried any number of settings; then I finally took out the battery and the small battery that saves settings in order to completely reset the camera's settings. When I put it back together it had lost the date and time settings, sure enough - but the tapes all still played as blank. I am in tape mode, not card mode. I am in VCR mode. Lock is not on. When I play any tape, all I get is the blue screen with the turning wheels indicating that a tape is playing but there's no image on it.

As an experiment, I opened a brand new tape and recorded a couple of minutes of footage on it. When I played it back, it appeared blank too.

Does anyone have any advice on what to do? I need to try to get this working as fast as I can because I have about a week before I need to have those tapes completed. I don't have access to any other MiniDV equipment, so I can't test for sure whether the tapes work properly on other equipment. Does anyone have any idea what I can try to get my tapes back?

-Paul

[Jonathan Richards]

Try cleaning the heads - it sounds clogged.

[Brendan Getchel]

Semi-OT here, but thought it'd get more exposure:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=12758

[Andre Viol]

In a previous post I explained that I live in Brazil. And I want to buy a new camcorder and it will be a GL-2 or a VX-2000, most probably a VX because of its low-light performance.
Since I live in Brazil (currently I live here in the US but I will have to go back to my country definitely in 11 months), and the camera I will buy will have USA warranty, and USA warranty will be only good while I am here in the US, I was think about the so-called gray (grey?) market.
What is exactly a gray market camera? According to what I have read and understood so far, it's related to camcorders that do not carry US warranty, they are probably made for Europe and carry an European warranty (or no warranty at all?).
Well, in my country the system is PAL, but not the same as in Europe, in Brazil it's PAL-M and the big difference between the Brazilian PAL and the European PAL is that in Brazil, since we have energy at 60HZ in the outlets, and not at 50Hz, the PAL system runs at 60Hz, with 60fps, interlaced - just like NTSC.
Also I have read that the PAL system has some advantages over the NTSC system, with sometimes better colors, etc, etc, (and minor disavantages) as discussed in some sites that I found in the Internet.

So, my question is:
- if the PAL since is, supposably, better than the NTSC
- if I don't care about the warranty because the camera, when I get to Brazil, will be Brazilian grey market anyway - Sony of Brazil does not offer warranty for Sony products bought outside Brazil and they don't sell the VX-2000 in Brazil, so any VX-2000 bought in Brazil will not carry any warranty - if a store says it has a warranty, it's a lie

Can I get a better camera (PAL) at a better price from buying in some cheap gray market store? When I say cheap, I don't mean cheap because the camera was stripped out of its original accessories, I want all the original accessories, but I mean without a US warranty.

Is it possible and easy to convert a footage from European PAL to Brazilian PAL without loosing quality by, for instance, capturing the original PAL footage to the computer, making the necessary edit - in original PAL - and then converting the final result to PAL-M? This is a crucial question because if I can't have my footage in PAL-M, the European PAL camera would be useless.

I guess that converting from PAL-European to PAL-M should not be a good idea because how come 50Hz will be turned into 60Hz? Weird,

Just out of curiosity, in Brazil all the VCRs - I am still in the VCR era, I don't have DV player and I won't have one any time soon - play both the PAL-M and the NTSC formats. But they don't play any other PAL system, only the PAL-M. The most recent television sets are also able to show PAL-M or NTSC video, although the air transmitted stations use only PAL-M, for this is the law.

If it's not a good idea to buy a PAL camera, is there any other disavantage of buy a camera in the grey market besides not having a US warranty?

Thanks.

[Frank Granovski]

NTSC cams are used in Brazil. The PAL system they use is 525 / 60 fields. So don't go with a PAL cam. I would just buy a USA model with its USA warranty. The USA prices are good (better than Canadian prices even). :)

Grey market cams usually do not have a warranty. However, Pana cams come with an international warranty. I don't think that Sony does.

[Gene Brockhoff]

I just purchased this mic and it won't pick up sounds once you get 5 ft away. The onboard mic pics these sounds up very well although a bit noisy. The xlr to mini plug adapter looks like a stereo. I thought shotgun mics were mono? should the mini plug be a single mono type? If thats not the answer Maybe I'm missing something in the settings that I don't know about. Any tips on how to get this working right? It sounds great when you speak directly into it, such as a voice over narration though.

[Don Palomaki]

The mic is balanced, thus the three conductors - one is +, one is -, and the other is ground. It is mono (but you can buy a "stereo" shotgun AT815 series mic).

The adapter cable you have could be one of several configurations - it could be balanced which can cause some issues if used with the mic adapter (out of phase channels); it could adapt the balanced to unbalanced and feed the same signal to each channel of the GL2 and that should be OK, or it could do something else.

Could you describe the setting you are using, and details as to the sound close and at a nominal distance. If it works well close, moving out should not cause sudden problems.

[Christian Bovine]

Most of my shoots are outside, and some of our best footage have come from on the fly questions with people, with just the on camera mic. Which we realize later is usually terrible and can't even use it because you can't really hear what they are saying.

I have a shotgun, but hooking it up quickly is hard, so I bought a wireless plug-in for it and I am hoping this will allow me to roam with the mic and get the best audio. We have been using it, but it would be pluged into the adapter with the XLR wires and we would always have to people connected to each other with the wires.

I think the wireless will help but can anyone think of any other ways of getting better audio on the fly outside.

[Graham Bernard]

When using a shotgun, make sure you haven't got any solid walls directly behind the subject; the subject doesn't have anything noisy behind; have the subject stand in front of non-reflective surface - leaves, foliage, soft drapes, soft partition wall, try and use the subject as a "baffle" for sound . . . can't think of anything else at present.

Grazie

[Christian Bovine]

Usually it isn't a situation where I can place the person in a certain spot and be sure to have everything just right. I am usually standing next to the person as they are in the middle of something, or waiting to do something. So trying to get the best sound in diverse situations is what I am looking for.

Thanks