Shooting and editing this was a lot of fun and I appreciate the chance to work creatively! The goal is to create quality music videos within a faster turnaround time and for a lot less than the bigger studios. We’re always up for a challenge!

This is a part of a ‘trip video’ with a youth hockey team that I’ve shot in Europe in 2009. This was even done on HDV tapes, seems like a lifetime ago.
I came across it while digging through the archives. It’s a serious topic but I love how the kids react – who says that kids these days are detached and don’t care about history?

Scraps and Pieces from the cutting room. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now. Finally! People, places and productions. Cameras used: Sony EX1-3, Panasonic HMC150, GH2, Canon 7D, Sony whatnot and so on.
Most clips are fairly raw, some are colour corrected but they were all picked to easily judge the shooter. Now it’s up to you.

Music video shot for Tom-E Cousins and Mossamo. Viva L’Italia! We build a nice set in Canmore – turns out to be a great inspirational getaway for Calgary artists.

Final Cut X

Yes, I’ve jumped onto that bandwagon the minute it came out. It was just too hard to ignore and I was far too curious after the previews. This won’t be the in-depth review it deserves, besides, there are plenty of them out there. A few thoughts however on the matter:

Is it worth it?

In my opinion, yes. One reason being, that it is $300. How can you ignore that? A 64bit software with pro features for next to nothing.

After spending more time with it, I am not missing any features yet. If you have invested in a host of  plugins for FCP 7, then you have good reasons to hang on to FCP 7 at least for a while until plugins become available for X and they will.

The speed is amazing. The clip browser is fast, supporting a wide range of formats without prior conversion. That part is important for me, since I work with a lot of different formats: AVCHD, XDCam, Canon H264 etc. It does create optimized clips as a background procedure unless you choose to work with proxies.

Do not expect to jump in and edit like you’re used to after years of FCP. It might look like a beefed up version of  iMovie, but it has all (well, most) of the features one would expect as an independent NLE editor. The interface and especially the treatment of timelines and nested sequences takes the longest of getting used to.

Once there’s a bit more time I’ll put a review together.

Cinevate Pegasus slider

Canon 7D

New camera equipment. What a great tool for a variety of shoots! I’ve noticed that I do miss an HD HDMI feed for monitoring.

Cinevate Pegasus Carbon DSLR slider

Adding smooth motion to some shots. Easy to carry around and operate.

I love working with great tools.

I’ll be back in front of the computer to put out more info and samples soon.

Enjoy summer everyone!

Selkirk-Tangiers Heliskiing from Michael Klekamp on Vimeo.

How to change lives from Michael Klekamp on Vimeo.

It’s great being an engineer from Michael Klekamp on Vimeo.

This was produced as a welcome video for Thurber Engineering’s Facebook welcome page. Yes, engineering companies DO have social media strategies.
It’s the first in a mini series that is designed to draw attention to the profession and connect with possible employees.

Shot on Canon Rebel T2i / 550D

Director/CameraOp: Michael Klekamp

Sound recording with Zoom H4N

Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me since it seem to require snow leopard.

Now, I have successfully updated to snow leopard while still running Final Cut Studio 2 including all its updates to Final Cut 6.0.6. What happened? It crashed every time I opened the log and transfer window. A complete reinstall even with the help of Digital Rebellion’s remover software didn’t improve anything, especially not my nerves.

The rule ‘Never change a running system’ comes to mind and I was dreading the impending rollback attempt with  Time Machine.

Thanks to my buddy Brent I found that I neglected to check for system updates: 1.08 GB later snow leopard was updated and the log and transfer is working again.

The second step: Pay attention to the details! After installing the Canon E1 plugin I used  TextWrangler as recommended by the Bui brothers to change the camera.plist file. Again, no luck. The devil is in the details: If it says

Now, it works. Go try for yourself and enjoy the workflow.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, check the Bui brother’s and Nathan Beaman’s blog.

Canon 550D / Rebel T2i Banff footage from Michael Klekamp on Vimeo.

Handling
For all of you out there who know the 5D or the 7D, yes it does feel flimsy. It doesn’t have the heavy reassurance of its bigger relatives. The buttons are where you’d expect them. There is no LCD display on top and so far I haven’t missed it.
If you mount it onto any box (like the Shape Chameleon) in order to raise it comfortably to your eyes even for tripod use, keep in mind that the batterie door opens to the bottom.
I cut out the necessary gap in my Shape box, which doesn’t seem to present any issues for the stability since the camera doesn’t weigh much even with a bigger lens.
Now I can leave it mounted and can change batteries.

Canon 550D with Shape box cut out for batterie change

Canon 550D with Shape box cut out for batterie change

Batterie life
Batterie life greatly improves when you turn the image stabilizer that your lens might have to OFF.
The manual states batterie life at room temperature to be around 1.5 hours, so far I’ve gotten at least that. A bonus is of course that those batteries used for the 550D are not incredibly expensive, so there aren’t too many excuses for not having enough.

Recording time

What’s with the recording limit? The limit is 4GB or 12 min of HD footage. It seems to be solely a software issue stemming from the Fat32 file format and Canon’s de-interest in solving the issue. It requires linking of the chunks to create one file. Practically that means after 12 min there will be a 10 second break and then you hit the button again.

Canon 550D with Shape box and Zaguto Z-Finder

Zacuto Z Finder
The Z Finder makes life way easier. Better focussing, no light distractions. I find that I have to move around in the eyepiece a bit to actually see the whole screen – the recording marker in the top right corner is peripheral vision if you’re focused on the centre. It just takes some getting used to.

Audio
Never, ever try to record quality audio with this camera. There are no firmware upgrades or third party improvements on the horizon yet to manually control the audio. At the moment, it is auto gain control and no levels.
I’ve bought the new Zoom H4n field recorder with XLR inputs to get good audio.

The Bottom Line
It’s amazing what you can get with this C$ 850 body. Put some decent glass in front and you’re styling.

What’s To Come
Review of the Shape Chameleon for DSLRs and video cameras. Stay tuned!

Thank you for your time and I hope that you’ve found this helpful. Fell free to leave comments!