Thread: Night time shots

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OK guys I need to know what is the best camera to use at night to record and have all our props show up when we put the video out next year ? Please get back to me but try and be reasonable on the price too. Thanks.

I was asking the same of Terra recently, as her haunt is filled with UV paint & blacklights galore. In her vids, she said that she used a Flip HD for the beginning of her walk through video from this year. The results were outstanding with a +/- $100 camera/camcorder. It looks better than the 2nd half that she filmed with a fairly pricey Sony HD cam.

Filming fluorescent scenes is actually more akin to shooting daylight shots. To the camera, they are bright and easy for the camera to film. Dark scenes though is where the problems come in. The Flip cameras do an okay job with darker shots but I wanted better for this year. Here's the graveyard shot with a Sony Handycam HDR-CX550:



Even then, did a little brightness tweaking in Premiere Elements.




In the beginning of this video you see the same graveyard but filmed with the FlipVideo for comparison. Can't remember if it was tweaked in by the software Premiere Elements also:



Software can help you a lot in bringing up darker pictures. I like the new Sony camera a lot but watch it if you get one. HD video is extremely taxing on your computer and if you want to edit it as well - get ready for some smoke to shoot out of it . You need a powerful computer to keep up. I see that the HDR-CX550 has been replaced with a newer version that shoots 60 fps (frames per second) compared to the 30 fps. That makes even bigger files for (IMO) not that big of a payoff.

Thanks for the info Terra That's good news to me, because I already have the Adobe CS 5.5 Master Collection. I just need a good camera to replace mine

Just to add to what you said about needing a powerful computer, video compressing/rendering/editing is best done on a cpu with as many cores as you can possibly get. Those programs are highly mult-threaded and will spread the workload across as many cpu cores as you have available. eg: hex-core > quad core > dual core. Server chips are better than consumer cpu's for this sort of thing (Depending. My 4.2 Ghz hexa is just marginally slower than a 12 core server chip. Overclocking makes up for a lot). Being that they can have as many as 16 cores per cpu, which drastically reduces rendering time. Another way to increase the speed is by having a very fast scratch disc. This is a situation where Solid State Drives (SSD's) really increase the performance. A fair amount of ram (memory) is also a good idea for a machine that's regularly used like this. 8-12 GB of ram is highly recommended. Although, alternately you can instead use some high quality overclocking memory, and get similar results. In the end, it's cheaper to buy the 8-12 GB of OK memory, than 4 GB of say...my Elpida Hyper equipped Super Talent Project X sticks. Even though the STT's will outperform nearly 3x larger amount. But, if you already have them...

Now that this has been taken completely off topic, if you'd like any advice on a system build for doing heavy tasks. Just ask, building them is what I do

***Daddy's Little Monster***