With the addition of video capabilities dSLRs, still photography cameras are becoming more and more popular for “guerilla” style filmmaking.

A couple nights ago, I had my first opportunity to use a dSLR to shoot video. I personally didn’t do any shooting (because I was… acting… yes, I know, I know…), but I did get to edit the video we shot. We used Anthony DiMaria’s Nikon D5000. It barely has any advanced settings for video — unlike Canon’s 5D MKII, 7D, and the soon-to-come 1D MKIV, it’s definitely not being catered to serious videographers.

We shot 720p HD, 24fps. The results from the camera were fairly decent. I was pleased with the general image we captured, and the camera’s performance in low light levels. There were some issues, however.

While we didn’t experience any of the “jello” effects that comes from the dSLR using a rolling shutter, there were other problems. The D5000 gives no control over auto-exposure. This means that whenever the camera moves or action happens in-frame, the camera automatically detects the light levels and adjusts the exposure to keep the image at a good level. To translate that to video camera terminology, it would be like leaving the auto iris on.

Auto iris (or exposure) is okay if you’re shooting home movies. But it’s a big no-no if you’re trying to shoot anything that’s supposed to have some quality. It just doesn’t look good to have the light levels in the frame changing during shots. The especially bad thing with the D5000 and this is that the exposure changes aren’t smooth; they’re chunky incrementals.

The D5000′s on-camera mic is pretty terrible, and there’s no way to plug in external audio sources. So we’re going to be completely re-recording the audio from our shoot. The only other problem we had, though minor, was that the camera records video to the AVI codec, which isn’t a very good format. I had to render every clip in my Final Cut timeline before I could play it.

Learning from this shoot, here are a few things I would look for in a dSLR camera before buying/using it for video:

Here’s a few screenshots from the video.