Feeling things out...

Well, after spending all of Saturday putting in a new hot water tank and Sunday doing other chores, I didn't have much time to get out and test my T2i. However, I did sneak outside for a few minutes to capture some video. I'm starting to get more and more used to shooting with my Canon, but I'm still not at any kind of a comfort level yet. My biggest complaint about Canon's control setup is their use of only one wheel to control exposure settings and having to holding down buttons while using that wheel to change different aspects of the exposure. Nikon typically has two wheels, one for shutter and one for iris, so I find myself fumbling around trying to remember which button I need to be holding to get what I want. Once I got my settings the way I wanted, things actually started to go a bit smoother. The T2i automatically goes to live view when you switch over to video and recording is only a button press away from that.

Since our current snow storm was moving in (hopefully I'll shoot more when it gets here), conditions were very overcast and there isn't much color around here in winter anyway, so things have that winter washout to them. It wasn't the bright daylight that I was hoping to shoot in and test, but I was still able to shoot at ISO 200. After that I went inside to test it in Tungsten/low light. The day I got it I played with shooting inside since it was already dark outside, but I didn't know the settings well enough and got very jumpy and under exposed  clips. So, after a little reading and menu diving I was ready to try it again, but I was still nervous that it wouldn't do well. I think my results below speak for themselves, though.




As far as editing was concerned, I had already learned that the H.264 codec is horrible for editing since it is a delivery codec, so I knew it needed to be converted to an uncompressed format. My problem was that I hadn't come across anything that told me what the minimum bitrate for keeping quality video was. Looking back, I could probably have stood to go a bit higher, but for a test video, the results seemed acceptable. I did find out that I like the H.264 codec while I was converting. Changing it over with Any Video Converter took very little time at all, but I'm sure upping the bitrate would cut into that depending on how high I go. I should also confess that the footage above is not raw footage. I adjusted the contrast (probably pushed it a bit too high) and tried to add a bit of color to it. However, I didn't do anything to adjust for the actual exposure nor did I adjust for noise. If anything, I added noise by making the adjustments and sub par conversion job. Oh well, I guess that's why it's called a learning process...

Got any conversion or shooting advice for me? Leave it in the comments below. I'm always open to ideas....

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