Gentle Giant

I recently helped direct and shoot a music video for a great band called The Nobility. The video was shot using my Panasonic HMC150 at 720p 24p. In post we added some looks in Magic Bullet Looks and further dirtied up the video a bit using Nattress Film Effects. All of this to hopefully capture the look of an old filmstrip PSA. I'm pleased the results and the camera performed well.

Here is the video for your viewing pleasure:

"Gentle Giant" video from The Nobility on Vimeo.

Scary Thought...

Here's a scary thought... you've been shooting footage for 30-40 minutes on your SDHC card and suddenly you get a CHECK CARD warning. You check the card, it records again just fine and you assume it was a temporary blip. But what if, when you're ingesting that footage in to your system, you discover the clip is unreadable or completely missing? The HMC150 does not have a redundant system for recording media - you have one card slot and thus one card that can record media at any given point. Of course many cameras are this way, and if you're still recording tape there's always a risk of the tape breaking, but with tapeless media it just seems all the more scary.

There's a long and eye-opening thread about a handful of people who are seeing these kinds of problems with one particular brand of cards - Transcend. There seem to be twice that many that have replied to say they own the same brand and size of card and have had zero problems. It's worth checking out.

HMC150 Mac support, finally

Panasonic has finally acknowledged that people who own the HMC150 also might own a Mac. So now you can finally update the camera's firmware. Here's the link for instructions on how to do that.