New camera to use…

My brother has kindly let me borrow his Sony DSC-RX100. It’s certainly a big step up from my iPhone 5. When it was released in 2012, the Sony DSC-RX100 was considered the pinnacle of compact cameras. With a 20.2 megapixel CMOS Exmos sensor, you can get stunning photographs even in low-light conditions. I’ve already had a go at taking long exposure shots at night.

What is it like for shooting video? I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but I can already see some limitations. I doubt many people use it for filmmaking apart from vloggers. The main reasons are:

1. You will always have poor sound unless you use an external recorder — there is no audio input so you can’t plug a microphone in and the in-camera microphone picks up the wind when shooting outside.
2. If you want to shoot actuality (real stuff where people often move around), it’s quite fiddly to use; interviews and static general view shots will look pretty great though.
3. Camera shoots at 50 frames per second — if you want that film look, people go for 24 fps which is the industry standard.

Before going to see Youth, I shot some external and internal general view shots of Barbican, a cool arts centre in London. Here’s some observations from using the camera:

1. When attempting a pull focus(moving focus from one point to another) like the first shot in my film, it’s hard not to shudder the camera when you come to a stop making it look a bit rubbish.
2. When shooting handheld, you should turn on anti-shake assistance; I had it switched off and with the wind and my shaky hands, that small 4-second shot of the tower block makes me nauseous.
3. I found it difficult to get my focus bang on even with image peaking assistance. Tip for future: zoom in to the point you want to focus on, get it perfectly focused, then zoom out and take your shot.
4. Shutter speed? Bit of a mystery to me. I know the general rule is shutter speed should be double your frame rate, but if the Sony DSC-RX100 shoots at 50 fps, then shutter speed should be 1/100 of a second — that seems very high? If you’re reading this and are an expert in shutter speeds, please do get in contact via comments below or on Twitter.

Overall though, I’m pretty impressed with it and now that I have two devices, I can shoot video on the Sony DSC-RX100 and record audio on my iPhone 5 using the app iTalk (it’s free and is better than the standard Apple app ‘Voice Memos’)— this setup is called ‘double-system recording’. This is standard practice in films and TV dramas; in documentaries, it is more of personal/situational choice as to whether to use single- or double-system recording. I am going to try out double-system recording with the equipment I have got and sync it together in iMovie — this will be the subject of my next blog post.