DV Rebel Crash Cam

Canon has announced the HV20, a tiny little 1080p24 camcorder with an MSRP of US$1,099.

Dzang!

It has HDMI out, which means you could pair it with a Blackmagic Intensity card ($250) to capture 4:2:2 uncompressed 24p for less than the price of a decent boom mic setup.

The CMOS chip is true 1920x1080.

We'll have to see how fussy the manual controls are, but this camera just may have DV Rebels everywhere contemplating an impulse buy.

Update: More info from HDVinfo.net.

2nd Update: HV20 now available from Amazon.

The Most Unlikely Places

I never thought I'd hear the DV Rebel spirit represented on the director's commentary of I, Robot (a $120M film), and yet there it is, during the scene where Will Smith runs from the giant demolition bot through the crumbling mansion (I'm paraphrasing a bit):

We just dumped a whole bunch of stuff from the roof to fall in Will's path, and used long lenses... Often the best sort of film illusion is one that you can achieve on the set quickly...

CG takes many months to get right, and it's a very analytical process, a very sort of scientific process of getting shots and analyzing them and fixing them and constantly improving them.

It's a hell of a lot more fun to sort of wobble the camera around and run around like crazy with a few strobing lights and get something really exciting happening right in front of you.

Director Alex Proyas also describes perfectly why the DV Rebel approach of working backward, not forward is so important and can save you time and money (on DVD chapters 12–13), and how the Hollywood filmmaking machine unwittingly conspires against this wisdom.

The Photographer’s Right

Oh, I love this. A downloadable PDF outlining your rights as a photographer in public places. There have been at least three times in the last few months that I really could have used this.

DV Rebels, download it, print a few, and stash them in your camera bag.

The Photographer’s Right

[via]

Google SketchUp 6 & Photo Match

I wrote a bit in The Guide about using the free Google SketchUp as a planning tool for shoots. Version 6 was just released, and it has some great new features. By far the coolest is Photo Match—I see all kinds of potential here for filmmakers.