I would love to have the same camera as my son, a Sony EX1 but there was no way that my funds would run to that sort of money. For the most part what I have, the Canon Vixia HF100 does what I need anyway. The lens is good enough although I have just bought a cheap wide angle lens to put on the front of it and while it didn’t make a huge difference it did help some. I felt I needed it for a documentary style video I will be producing starting this month. I will not have a lot of space to step back and get in all of what I want to shoot in a lot of places.
The other addition is for the audio. While I was in Liverpool before Christmas there was a friend there with a similar camera to mine and he had a converter cable to go from the 3.5mm mic jack on the camera to an XLR cable with a Shure SM58 microphone on the end of that. It worked pretty good and so I have got the same. The guy from Shure was suggesting a cable that they sell costing about 60 but I found one much less than that. Maybe it will work right and maybe it won’t. At least worth a try anyway.
I had tried to use a wired lavalier mic but while it works connected to my Zoom H2 recorder it did not work in the Canon Vixia camera. To have the EX1 would be great seeing as it has XLR inputs already. I can record the audio separate with the H2 and I might still use that method for some shooting. It is just that it takes time to marry the audio back up with the video afterwards. I think I had better start saving to get a better camera.
I have just set up a Video20Q Newsletter. I will only be sending infrequently because usually if I have something to say I will put it in a blog or post onto Twitter. But after seeing a video by IzzyVideo about running a site like this he was saying that he wished he had set up something like that much earlier than he did. Here is the place to get the video from Israel Hyman. Also do check out his Video site that shows how to use FinalCut Express. which is a series of very good video tutorials.
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