Also check out my website: fraleyfilms.com
Enjoy.
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First of all, you should see the advantages of my camera: it takes beautiful, film-style video at consumer camcorder prices, it weighs almost nothing, and you can quickly change lenses. The interchangeable lenses are actually really important: by changing lenses, you immediately take away that awful flattened-out, generic camcorder zoom look that most television and home productions have.
Another plus is that it's a really nice still camera too, so if you ever need professional-quality photos taken of something, you already have the right tool for the job.
Also, if you buy any other canon body (particularly another t2i or 60d), all of the lenses will fit exactly the same, and the footage will also come out looking exactly the same, which is nice.
The disadvantages (and there are a lot):
-The camera is really shaky if you just hold it by itself, because it wasn't designed to be ergonomically held steadily for long periods of time. It was designed as a still camera. It needs a monopod or a shoulder mount to give decent footage.
-Audio requires a pretty pricey work-around to actually be useable with wireless mics.
-Zooming almost always pulls the image out of focus. Ordinary video camcorders do this too, but they usually automatically compensate, so you usually don't notice unless you zoom particularly quickly. These don't, so unless you're amazingly good at zooming and focusing at the same time, zooming will defocus everything.
-There is a 12-minute clip limit while filming at full HD. If you want to film for longer than 12 minutes, you have to hit the stop button at the 12 minute mark, and then hit it again to start another video clip. I don't know why; something to do with how it encodes the movie. ...This has never been a problem for me, but I figure it's worth mentioning.
-Everything is manual. This is a plus, too, but it's a real disadvantage if you don't know what you're doing. Focus, aperture, ISO, shutter speed -- changing any of these things changes the "style" of the footage in some way or another.
Photographers (especially "still" photographers) will know about all of these, but ordinary folk won't. If whoever will be using this camera knows what they're doing or is willing to play around with it for a bit, then I think this camera would be excellent for all of your above-consumer-camcorder needs. As far as I know, I'm the only outdoor videographer using this kind of camera, and I think that's why my footage tends to look "deeper" and more cinematic than the rest.
But if the person using this camera is just another layman who came along for the ride and is having this camera tossed at them, then I would go with a more traditional style of camcorder. (I would probably recommend this one if you want really nice footage out of something that's ridiculously simple to operate, or this one if you still want interchangeable lenses and all of those benefits. If I had a whole lot more money lying around I'd totally pick up one of the latter. Be warned, though: it uses completely different lenses than I'm going to be talking about, so don't go buying the sony camera and some canon lenses that I recommend later on.)
Anyway, if you're still excited, read on.
My camera is a Canon Rebel T2i. I bought it at Robert's Camera in downtown Indy for less than I could find it online at a reputable dealer. I believe now they are selling the body only for about $650 or $700. The Canon 60D has a few more very nice features (like manual audio control knobs and a pivoting screen) but it costs $200 more, and sticking on a viewfinder loupe (I explain what that is later) is just a little bit problematic.
For lenses, you will need at least three of them to do essentially everything you'll need.
The one you'll be using all the time will be the 18-135mm zoom lens. This lens has about the same zoom range as your average camcorder. Not super wide, but not really long-range either. It's the lens that I keep on my camera most of the time.
Second, you'll need a wide-angle lens. The one I use is the Canon 10-22mm lens. It's a bit pricier because for some reason, big wide lenses are all a lot more expensive than other lenses. But honestly, it's the wide-angle shots that really add a lot to films. They exaggerate depth and motion, which makes moving shots prettier and makes very up-close shots more meaningful. They also let you get a much wider shot from much closer, letting you do things like film a nicely composed interview while inside a teensy hunting blind. I don't like the fisheye distortion effect, which is why I linked to a rectilinear lens, which doesn't distort like fisheye lenses do.
Lastly, you might want a longer lens, like the 70-300mm telephoto. This is the really long lens I was showing you this afternoon. This lens is great if you need really up-close shots of far-off wildlife, but it is very limited. At its widest setting, it is still 70mm long! That's about the same as a 2x zoom on your normal camera. Being stuck with 2x zoom may not seem like all that bad until you try to go from looking at a deer at 300mm and then trying to pull back and have a hunter interview. It just doesn't work. You'll be interviewing your hunter's nose hairs.
The other downside of this lens is that the image stabilization makes a lot of noise. It sounds almost like the clicks and whirrs that a computer makes. This is bad on film.
But the lens definitely has its uses. I used it almost exclusively on our recent hunt in texas, because I was in a blind and the hunter was on the ground, and I just needed that extra bit of reach that it gave me.
There are literally hundreds of other lenses to look at, but those are the three I would recommend for someone on a budget.
If you can spend a bit more, you can get lenses that will open up wider (this helps a TON in low-light. Because the sensor is so large in these cameras, with the right lens, you can essentially shoot by moonlight and have it come out looking fine). If you're willing to fork out the cash, you could replace the 18-135mm AND the 70-300mm with this one lens that will do both jobs better than those two lenses could individually. It just costs $2.5K.
The cool part is that if you get two t2i bodies, you can have one guy filming with the wide-angle lens and another with a longer lens, and then you don't have to worry about switching back and forth between lenses ever.
To be able to see the LCD screen well enough to accurately focus, you'll need a viewfinder loupe with a 3/2 aspect ratio (this is currently the only model available, I think). I went without one of these for a while, and then I finally got one, and you would not believe how much of a difference it made. Easily one of the most essential accessories ever made.
Then you need to worry about audio.
If you don't need wireless mics, then this shotgun mic works perfectly when paired with the t2i. It really is just plug-and-go; no need to worry about how it's going to sound, because it always sounds fine. (They just announced that they're coming out with a new, better version, too.)
If you DO need wireless, then you need one of these and one of these. You plug your mic inputs into the box, which attaches to the other box, which mounts to the bottom of the camera. You monitor the audio through headphones and you're good to go.
If you don't already have one, pick up a monopod of some sort, a tripod, and a bag to cart your stuff around in and you're good to go. Oh, and this is the shoulder mount that I usually use. Nice and cheap, but works just fine with these light cameras. Everyone online won't stop talking about how amazing this little shoulder rig is.
There you go. A super comprehensive guide on the gear I have/want and why I have/want it. I use my gear for both outdoor filmography for TV shoots and also short film work, and imagine it'd work great for basically everything else you would want it for, except filming your child's soccer game for 2 hours straight, because of the clip time limit.
… and it seems like a little overkill to use this for that anyway.
Thanks a lot for hanging in there. Life is crazy busy. I'm in the middle of writing a "pre-wedding-life" blog post for you all. Await its arrival expectantly.
~Thomas Fraley
PS: (a heads-up about buying camera gear online: there is a lot of "gray market" stuff that is illegally imported, and therefore has no warranty. If something online is too cheap to be true, it's not. B&H is a safe place to buy, because they make sure to label all of their gray market stuff as "imported", instead of "USA".)
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