It features clips from the feature documentary I worked on last year, Rite of Passage. All footage was shot on dSLRs (7D and 60D, with the very first shot from a D5000).

One of the coolest things about shooting with a dSLR is that I was able to use multiple lenses. For this video, I used a standard 18-55mm zoom, a 55-200 zoom, and a 50mm prime lens. I was able to choose whatever lens I needed in order to capture the shot I had in mind.

One of the worst things about shooting with the D5000 is that the exposure lock button had to be held down during recording… You can’t just hit the button and let it go. And the jello that results from any movement… Not to mention that movement is also somewhat choppy. And aliasing happens a lot. Oh, and it records in AVI. Which is bad. Really bad.

But anyway, moving on. I had a ton of fun shooting it, wandering around outside and recording anything that looked interesting. I ended up with 87 clips, somewhere around 20 minutes of video.

So I moved all the footage from the SD card onto my computer, and dumped it onto the external hard drive I would be using to edit. Much to my dismay, I realized that I didn’t have enough space on it to even render the AVI files in the Final Cut timeline in order to play it… So I had to wait until a new hard drive came.

In the meantime, I decided to try something: color grading using Photoshop CS4 extended. Photoshop isn’t known for doing video. It’s for photos (it’s in the name, after all)! I was amazed at how powerfully PS handled the first video clip I opened to try it out — treating it the same as if I were editing a still. I ended up grading all of the shots I thought could potentially be used in the video.

Then my hard drive arrived, and I was finally able to edit it. I was quite surprised and pleased with how the workflow turned out, in spite of the severe limitations of the camera.

So, 200 Law.

Click the link to watch it on Vimeo in HD.

200 Law from Chad Stembridge on Vimeo.

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.