Filming an Adventure, a helplife2.net session

[Emporius]

As some of you know, I am an avid canoeist, and every summer I embark on trips with a tripping camp. Next summer I will be partaking in the pinnacle of the camp's trips, known as 'Voyageur 2'. V2 is a 52-day canoe trip through the wilderness of North-Western Canada. It should be an incredible experience, and I plan on trying to film it and create a small film/doc (nothing professional, but to show to friends/family/campers/etc).

I am however lacking the equipment necessary to do this, and I remembered that several of the members here seemed knowledgeable in the way of film and photography.

I am looking at good quality with a budget as low as possible.

I will need:

• A camcorder (HiDef or no?)
• tapes/memory cards (how many, what kind, help)
• batteries (extras are obviously required, and how fast will some drain under certain conditions)
• A possible source of recharging energy (such as a solar panel, would it work, how, why, what)
• Any thing else you can suggest

I need to work out how much money I need to raise and the products I need over the course of the school year, and any help with this would be greatly appreciated, no matter how small.

 

[Adrien C]

Well, I recomend a canon XL2, its a nice pro-sumer camera, lots of options you can change and alter for a relatevely small price. It may be a little bit big for trasportation though. You can get one on ebay for about a 900 bucks.

You can find now in stores cheaper cameras that shoot in HD but that do not have as much options as a XL2 or GL2. This cameras are more "point and shoot", albeit in HD. The good thing is that they are small and ergonomic. Cons is that they don't have a wide angle and the zoom is praticaly inexistant ( the "zoom" in those cameras are just a pixel viewer) as opposed to the XL2 witch has a x20 optical zoom and you can also find wide angles to adapt to the camera.

I don't know if you won't see any current for 52 days, wich mean you will also need to think about batteries. If you can't recharged them, you will need several of them wich you could later sell on ebay if you don't ever use them.

If you need more tips feel free to ask.

 

[Emporius]

Would it be possible to effectively recharge camera batteries with a portable solar panel?

 

[Adrien C]

I have not seen one being sold, Im sure it does work. Arn't you guys bringing even a small diesel engine to make power ?

 

[Wanted Bob]

I doubt it, never heard of any sort of generator or engine being brought on a trip. I too was thinking of doing a doc but I guess theres not really a point if Emp is doing it...

 

[Emporius]

I have not seen one being sold, Im sure it does work. Arn't you guys bringing even a small diesel engine to make power ?

Oh no no no, we're going au naturel, sans the lack of clothing

 

[Wanted Bob]

I read that as "sans clothing"

 

[Emporius]

Bumped out of necessity

 

[Viperidae]

Is sound going to be a huge issue? Because you could invest in a Nikon D90 (a DSLR) and use the cine mode; it's probably one of the best, if not the best (not many tests out yet) HD image you can get. Not to mention the myriad of possibilities from lenses. It's also really small.

But you'd need a ton of CF/SD cards. Sound is shit too. You could bring a seperate audio recorder though...

 

[Solaris]

Wilt the camera not get wet?

 

[Emporius]

Is sound going to be a huge issue?

I hope to find a camera with relatively good sound recording, as some things may be filmed in less than satisfactory weather conditions, and especially high winds.

Wilt the camera not get wet?

I will be taking every precaution necessary to ensure that the camera stays dry.

 

[Viperidae]

Well, no camera in the world is going to have good sound in high winds. You can use a shotgun mic with a windscreen, but build quality isn't going to override the fact that it's next to impossible record in wind properly.

 

[Ennui]

Get a handheld camera, preferably one that records to mini-DV and outputs to Firewire or USB. Pretty much any handheld DV cam will work for your purposes, you can spend anywhere from $600 up on a decent one. In terms of sound quality you may want to buy an external mic. Mini-DV is a tape format of very high quality (DV AVI) on small minitapes. Depending on the tape you can fit a couple of hours of footage on one, so a pack of 6 or so would probably fully satisfy your needs.

The battery thing is an issue though. You could buy more rechargeable batteries but they are pretty expensive and you would need a TON of them to last you 52 days. Ideally if you could find a battery-powered recharger that would be awesome but I don't know if they exist. There are also presumably video cameras that use normal batteries.

Also I would recommend using Premiere to import/edit unless you have access to a Mac and Final Cut Pro.