Busy Birds at Brandon Baldwin.

There’s a steep learning curve to the new (to us) video camera. The XF305 is not for the faint hearted :-), but we’re getting there. Worked out most of the systems, and slowly getting to grips with the ergonomics – no pun intended – which in itself is quite a task given that most surfaces are covered by control buttons or switches of one sort or another…. We know, of course, from experience of using advanced DSLR’s that muscle memory will eventually kick in and at that point you don’t have to think of, or look at, controls to know you’re hitting the right one for a given situation.

Installed a bunch of Custom Picture profiles now, and have found a few that give a more or less finished look that we like, so that’s a big bonus - in that it drastically cuts down editing requirements and precious time…

Anyway our video output may not be hugely interesting at present, but we are going through the learning process with this advanced tech – not helped by a catastrophic laptop failure last week in which we lost all the XF footage we had captured to date, and which required the purchase of a new £600 machine…. sigh.

Went to Brandon Marsh with the sole intention of capturing 30 minutes of footage to work with, which was no great chore :-).

The above video is a 5 minute clip – minus a few seconds cut from the front where I was setting the camera as I wished, from that 30 minutes, and I have to say I'm very pleased with it.

Again, my pleasure is not so much for the subjects captured, delightful as they are, but rather as a demonstration that I am actually picking up required techniques.

So the video shows, as I said above, 5 minutes of footage, roughly, all captured handheld and in one non-stop clip – for such a big lump of camera it’s good to see virtually no involuntary camera movement. I like the exposure, and my panning is OK.

You will appreciate that, due to limited broadband upload speeds we have to seriously reduce quality and this shows in the presented footage. I have posted it at 720P so make sure you view that resolution for best, or at least better, results.

The footage was originally 2gb of raw data – now reduced to 80mb or thereabouts.

Feel free to critique.