Production

For our first film project, we mostly used what we had on hand:

Video: Panasonic FZ-2500

This is a “bridge” camera because it’s part-way between a point-and-shoot and an interchangeable lens camera. It is a fixed-lens camera with a fairly wide zoom range. The real appeal of this camera is that it can shoot 4K 30P in-camera to inexpensive SD cards, it supports Panasonic V-Log and is also capable of sending 4K at 10-bits and 4:2:2 color. And it does all of this for about $1100. For the money, it’s a lot of camera.

Camera Support: 3 Legged Thing Punks Corey Tripod & Airhead Neo Ballhead

The tripod we had been using for our studio work was an old, off-brand tripod. It was actually a decent unit, but not very portable and not nearly as flexible as the Corey. Since there are only two of us on set, we don’t do a lot of camera movement, so the ball head was okay, but we’ll probably upgrade to a fluid head for the few times we can move the camera.

Audio: Zoom H5

We’ve had this digital audio recorder for quite a while and it is a fantastic little device. It has interchangeable mic capsules and we used both the X-Y capsule and the SSH-6 capsule, which is a shotgun mic with a mid-side channel for capturing dialogue but also ambient sound. The H5 also supports two additional XLR inputs so we can expand our audio capture abilities.

Lighting: Nothing!

We have a few lights, but we only used them to film the shoe commercial, which was shot in our little studio in front of a green screen. These are utility lights with photo-grade CFL bulbs. Very basic (and cheap!). All of the other scenes, indoor and outdoor, were shot using only natural light.

Post-Production

Video Editing: Final Cut Pro X

We used FCPX since it is so easy to quickly cut a film together. For video, we used nothing that wasn’t built into FCPX. We relied mostly on the LUT support for Panasonic V-Log, a little color correction, the Keyer and Mask plug-ins and a couple of transitions. Nothing fancy! And it all was done in 4K on a 2015 MacBook Pro.

Audio Editing: FCPX and iZotope RX6 Elements

We used RX6 Elements for basic noise reduction around the dialog in places where the background noise was intrusive. This is a highly effective tool that we use often. Other than volume adjustments, the only other plug-in we used is the “Direction Mixer” which is used to adjust the MS-Encoded file from the mid-side shotgun mic.