Shooting Weddings with HD100
 

Anyone have any advice on wedding shoots? Clients want a quick turnaround, and many do not have ability to view HD dvd's currently. Would HD original look better distributed to SD, or just originate in SD? What about HDV-SD60p
in order to do slo-mo(A mainstay of wedding footage) Anyone have any wedding footage shot with HD100? Thanks much in advance.

I've shot a few weddings with my HD101... I think it is perfect for it.

If you can't distribute in HD don't be afraid to use SD, the HD100 is a great SD camera as well.

HDV-SD60p looks pretty good, although I haven't used it myself as I can't edit it. Probably worth it if your NLE supports it.

If you decide to do it in HD (which WILL look better when converted directly to widescreen SD DVD), you have to have all your other cameras in the same format. If you don't have any other cameras, I'd say go for it. If you do, it would be a lot of extra work to uprez everything to 720p and then edit that. Do some tests and see if the increase in quality is worth it to you. It won’t be visible on a standard def. TV, but more so on a computer monitor or HDTV. Our Dell 24” shows all and DVD’s from DV footage don’t look terribly great on it, but look nice on a TV.

Even shooting 60p is tricky because all your cameras need to work together on the same timeline and 60p is not 60i. However, 60p might fit nicely on a 60i timeline and play back in real time, but give you the extra frames when you want them for slow mo. I haven’t tested it though.

I've shot only one wedding with the HD100 and liked it the most at the reception because I could go anywhere and not get tired since it was resting on my shoulder (mono-pod no more). I could also get tight without too much shaking for long periods of time. Of course once the lights go down, they're down and this camera doesn't seem better or worse at low light than my FX1.

I want to try 60p at a wedding sometime, but my suspicion is that it's not going to be worth the extra work of special capture and conforming to 24 or 30p over just shooting 60i. But maybe it is. I'd be interested to hear how people are doing it if they are.

Hi Hayes.

I don't do weddings but, if your workflow and deadlines allow it, I would suggest to shoot HD in 30p. If, next year, your clients want an HD version of the video you'll be ready and that could actually generate some additional cash :). Converting HD to SD in 16:9 is pretty straightforward, depends on your NLE/Compression suite. Colors are much better. Shooting in 30p gives you easier workflow today (for example with FCP) and can be converted to NTSC format easily.

Of course, the US model uses DV NTSC and 4:1:1 colour whereas my PAL model shoots 4:2:0 DV which is better suited to the 4:2:0 colour space of DVD's MPEG2 - I forgot about that.

that's why it's good to originate in hdv even if you're delivering a sd dvd. in ntsc land at least.

I had my friend use my HD100 to shoot my own wedding just last weekend, when I get time to post some shots I will. If you want to slow-mo some shots, you better go with 30P (in HD anyway) as the 24P shots slowed down are not so good.

Congratulation Tim hope your marriage is a good one.

Yeah, same here.

Yes, congrats on the wedding and thanks to all here for the insights and comments-everyone here is really great. Thanks again.

I shot it on the HD30p and it was beautiful, but detail needs to get turned down and slow-mo was very hard to do, my best bet is to do SD60p and therefore you are able to do slow-mo and it is very nice upscaled to 720p.

Are you using a mac?

Uh yes, sorry for not getting back-MacG5 2.3/FCP Studio