HV 20 from a ski boat? What settings?
 

What settings would you use to shoot someone waterskiing with the HV20?

I was afraid of that. Anyone want to trade an HV20 for a Sony H7?

Afraid of what? Just take the camera out there and find out what best suits your purpose.. ;-). HV20's a great cam.

With the speed of that sport I would shoot in 60i HDV... then when you get home you can convert the footage over to 60p and work in some time warping for slo motion work...

you might also consider a water proof bag if you think the cam might come in contact with some water...

take many different kinds of shots in both wide angle and zoomed out...

see if you can get the water spray during the turns.... if you can find another person with a different boat use that boat to take some shots to the side and just behind the skier...

also try to work in some footage just before the sun sets and that will highlite some of the spray footage and put a lot of color into the shots.....

again, shoot and shoot and shoot.... you can edit the heck out of it when you get home and pull the good stuff out of the not so good footage... :-)

keep the panning to a minimum... there's allready going to be enough action without you having to add to the mayhem...

I would think you would want a fast shutter speed also.

Thanks. I will have a week of shooting my kids and nephews in michigan but no way of knowing what it looks like until I return home and capture it with premiere. I was thinking 60i. I'm assuming that 60i is the normal HDV mode because I couldn't find 60i anywhere in the manual and that 24p is, well, 24p.

I have had some luck with 24p in cine mode but whenever it involves motion . . . well I'm anxious to try it with the 1/48 shutter speed people have mentioned around here. Hopefully too, 60i will eliminate some of the juttering. I won't know until its over, though. Thanks for the heads up about panning. I'm the ubermaster of overpanning.

Motion is not going to be your friend, regardless of shutter speed, if you get bucked around on board your ski boat.

Maybe take along something heavy, about house brick weight, attach some sort of tripod mount to fasten it to your camera, put some padding around the heavy object so it does not carve a chunk out of someone if you drop it.

Use the LCD screen if there is one in preference to holding a viewfinder up to your eye.

Hold this combination outbward loosely from your body rather than gather it in tight.

What you will end up with is a sort of bestid issue of steadycam and human biology which will hopefully float a little due to inertia and take out some of the shake.

Provided you are secure from going over the side, the wrist end of the palm of your left hand should go under the front end of the camera and the wrist end of the palm of your right hand should go under the rear of the camera.

Awkward it may seem but you may find it naturally steadier even if the run button and zoom control is hard to get at.

The Brick Cam. Why didn't I think of that? I'm a little jealous. I bet it works like a charm on the HV20. I was going to try a merlin but considering the wind . . . this sounds much better.

Matt

I'd like to see what you get out the HV20 for this type of shot.

I'd make a suggestion but I don't want to upset the fans. ;-)

Thanks
JohnG

you could try one of those pod things, thepod.ca i think, i've seen then around, but am really curious about their dampening capabilities, you might be able to just set the pod/cam on the back of the seat. in the olden days my brother and i would tape a camera to the back of the seat of our ski boat since we didn't have a 3rd person to run the cam. it worked well enough...

Austin

Interesting set of videos you have there. The JES deinterlacer seems to work reasonably well. Too bad it's just for the apple platform.

Thanks again
JohnG