Equipment

We have used a variety of equipment over the years, including 8 and 16mm film cameras for live and stop motion work. Lately we've gone strictly to video because of the cost and flexibility it offers.

Our latest efforts have been produced using the equipment listed below.

Cameras

Panasonic AG-DVX100B (2006)
    One of the best DV cameras. 3 1/3" CCD's. 24 frame progressive mode, with cinegamma modes for film look. Amazing low light capabilities. Great manual controls and XLR audio connectors built-in.
Sony TRV-900
    This is a good quality 3CCD mini-dv camera. It has manual control of exposure, white-balance and audio level, though the compact size makes the controls cumbersome. For more details see John Beale's page.

Lights

600 watt Smith-Victor Halogen movie light (2 lamps)
1850 watt Smith-Victor portrait kit (K78, 3 lamps)

Mics

Senheiser K6/ME66 shotgun
cheap but effective electret lav

Non-Linear Editors

Buz (1998)
    We started with the Iomega Buz in 1998. It worked very poorly, but gave us a taste of what could be done using a computer for an editor. It now has much better drivers under Linux than under Windows, but there is still only limited editing software.
Pinnacle DC30 (1999)
    This card is very similar to the Buz, but has vastly better support. It doesn't work very well under NT, but has been very stable and functional under Win98 with Premiere 5.1.
Matrox RT2000 (2000)
    This card is very powerful, able to play 2 streams of DV or mpeg2 video in real time. It can do cross fades and a variety of transitions in real-time. It was a royal pain to get all the necessary cards to co-exist and we never got the sound card in. Fortunately with the 2.0 update from Matrox most of the sound comes through the RT2000. The 2.0 update has been very stable for us, we've been able to make a 2 hour program with real-time titles and many real-time transitions without a single crash.
    This system now includes a Pioneer A03 DVD recordable drive for direct DVD authoring.
Matrox RTX-100 (2004)
    This is an updated version of the RT2000. It supports 3 layers of graphics and 2 layers of video in real time. It is not very different from the RT2000, but definitely an improvement in many areas. The RTX-100 works with Windows XP and Adobe Premiere Pro which seem more stable than earlier versions, though they make this 2.8 Ghz machine seem very slow.
    This system includes A Pioneer A05 DVD recordable drive, and a Shuttle Pro 2 jog/shuttle controller.

Misc Hardware

BeachTek XLR Adaptor
VariZoom FlowPod camera stabalizer

3D/Special Effects Software

Blender
    I've done some 3D and special effects work using Blender.