You guys made it a point pretty clear that you guys were using Hi8 during the start of college, and it's pretty easy to figure out you guys got great production stuff during in school, but now that you're out of school, what kind of equipment do you guys use for when you guys are shooting stuff?

I kind of figured you guys use the same equipment from Mike's work place, if they allow you to use them outside of his...work place.

For most videos, we stick with our little Sony MiniDV camera that we've had since Gang Wars. It's just a regular consumer camera, not even 3CCD, but it gets the job done. Occasionally, if we want something to look really good, I will bust out my Canon XHA1 from work, which can shoot in HDV (though I haven't shot anything that's not a wedding in HD yet). Out of recent videos, the Twilight spoof is the only thing I've shot with the Canon. For the most part, I prefer not to use it just cause...ya know...I'm not really supposed to. I'm far more lenient on using other pieces of equipment from work for our stuff, like tripods, lights, mics, etc. But that's what happens when they let me keep everything at home with me all year round.

To get really into detail, both Viral Video and Final Jerkoff were shot with Joey's MiniDV camcorder, which is also just a consumer camera but unlike ours is 3CCD, so it looks slightly better. Shenmue III was shot with my Panasonic DV10, which was my wedding camera before they gave me the Canon (the same camera made a cameo in Final Jerkoff as the one I used to shoot the wedding shot in the intro). Besides that, everything since Gang Wars has been on our little Sony.

-Mike

Thanks for the information. We are personally using a Sony DCR-HC28, which isn't really made for production stuff but it gets the job done for what we've been doing (taping trips). My sister mentioned several times we should make a movie but other than a failed FFVII movie back in High School (this was before all the other FFVII projects came out), we havn't really done much.

On that note, how are you able to record or rip the video off of the tape onto the computer with high quality? Lately my way of doing it has been making really laggy videos (could be because the computer's geting old)...that and I'm using Windows Movie Maker to rip videos as no other program seems to work for me.

What do guys use in terms of lighting? Or do you just say "fuck it?".
Since my damn cinematography class.....lighting has become a MAJOR pain in the ass.

I think learned from the complaining in Viral Video, and the recent video of the Word...thing for Oh! Video!, I think it's pretty safe to say it's "fuck it".

Ok that doesn't make any sense!

Hey been curious about this for a while and since we're talking about camera work what ratio do you guys film in (4:3/ 16:9/ 1:85:1 and all that). Been curious since noticing a few uses of the letterbox format i.e DS6 parts of your graduation, safety video, someones pic of TFJ on their TV.

We capture from MiniDV tape using a Firewire connection from the camera to the computer, and capture in Vegas, which gives us an avi file to work with. I don't know how Movie Maker works, but I'm sure it's crappy.

Obviously, when it comes to lighting, we usually say "fuck it." For Viral and TFJ, we were able to check out lights from the cage at school. Nowadays, I have a single flood light from work, which we can only use to brighten up our dark apartments for filming. Can't set up any fancy 3-point lighting with only one light, hence the horrendous shadows that are in many of our videos.

We are now shooting everything in 16:9 since that's obviously going to be the new standard. Viral, TFJ, and all of the newer Oh, Video! projects are in 16:9. We shot our the graduation video as 4:3 to match the rest of DS6. The footage from the actual graduation ceremony was taken from the official video the school shot, which turned out to be 16:9.

-Mike

Oh, so Vegas can import video too?! Do you think it will work with the Y/R/B plugs also? I hope I can, because I'm getting suck of converting the WMV to AVI to work with Vegas.

To follow up with the lighting question, do you guys still have passes to go to UIC? Or do you have to pay like $100 per year or you can't at all? Are you able to still get the school's equipment?

Depends what kind of capture device you're using. For video, you really need to use a Firewire connection from whatever you're capturing from (be it a camera or a deck with y/r/b inputs).

And no, we no longer have access to any of UIC's equipment. That probably won't stop us from showing up on campus to film stuff (I mean, what are they gonna do...arrest us??).

-Mike