Terry,

To get the "Emotional interpretations of burial rituals, represented by actors" you are looking for will require at least 3 different skills in production (plus capable actors, costume makers, make-up artists, etc.). Besides the critical skills of cinematography and audio, which have already been mentioned, you will need to include lighting. I don't believe it is possible to achieve excellent results without it. The need for all these crafts goes a long way to explain why film crews, even for documentaries, are normally multi-person affairs. Each of the crafts usually takes years to master, so you need to go into the project with your eyes open. In any case, a project like this will be quite a journey, but the results can be worth it. Good luck.

Best wishes,
Peter
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http://www.parkfilms.com

you've got it, if you link the boom to the camera then the sound is "in camera" and doesn't need syncing and if you shoot with a recorder like a DAT etc then it does need syncing. Syncing is easy as long as you have the on camera audio to sync it with........ALWAYS have your camera mic running, we had it off for a days filming due to some technical difficulties and it put me back about 3 days in the edit suit because i had to read lips to sync audio.

Pete's right, do you know how to light something?........cause if you do let me know! ..........just kidding

Andy.

Peter - Thank you for bringing this up. Lighting is something I am keeping in mind as well. This I think will be most difficult. I want the entire program to be naturally lit. Some places that I will be filming will have exceptionally low light and will be hard to film. Which is why I asked what camera will have the best low light capability.

Andy - Thank you for teaching me so much stuff.

Today the film crew was back on site. They had with them a Z1 with an extremely long shotgun mic and a DVX100 with no shotgun, simple on camera mic. They were doing hand held shots with no tripod or stedycam. One guy had earphones to the DVX100..What is that about?

I was unable to talk to them about anything because I had to finish my unit excavation before lunch so I was hoping they would stick around but they left after lunch...

What do you guys think about the Z1? I've heard alot of good things about it but is it going to be enough for the set up I am trying to devise?

So far, from our discussion, I will need an external recorder (Make?), Boom mic with a senheisser me66 and of corse a tripod (manfroto 501 head). But what camera...that is the question..

Terry, you can read this site's thousands and thousands of posts and peoples experiences and yes it is good to read but the one thing i've learned is that just doing it yourself is the only real way to learn, its the same as a musical instrument .....i've played guitar for 17 years and how good i am today has nothing to do with books or dvd's or even teachers, its just down right hard work and the desire to do it.

Its very easy for someone with a bit of knowhow or technical terms to make you feel like your not good enough, ignore how scary the tech talk is and all that garbage, its not rocket science like a lot of people willl have you think......watch tv and youll see the rubbish that people are paid to make.

Make your own way....mistakes and all. And as i said the right camera is the one you feel happy with.... you like canons so go with it.

I wish you the best. im sure youll do fine.

Andy.

You always, always, always need to monitor the sound through a pair of high-quality, noise isolating, headphones either attached to the mixer if recording to a separate recorder, and/or coming off of the camera if you're recording sound in-camera, while you're shooting. The professional standard set of cans is arguably the Sony MDR7506.

Oh, and did I mention you must always monitor the sound through headphones while you're recording? <grin>

I'm no camera guru, but from what I've seen I don't think any HDV camera will do what you are asking of it in dim natural light. At least, not without adding a lot of digital gain noise to the image. It really sounds like you need someone who knows how to light a scene so it appears to be naturally lit, although it isn't. That's part of why it takes years to learn these skills.

Best wishes,
Peter
______________________
http://www.parkfilms.com

Everyone,

You have all been great help. I now have a better idea of what I am going to need to pull this off.


Andy - Good luck with filming the reconstruction project. I hope to see the final product.

Cheers,
Terry.