HD for an upcoming short

Peter Egan · January 7, 2007

Hi there,

My first foray into these parts of the forum. I feel like an alien, as I've purposefully limited myself to film, in particular 16mm for my ARRI S.

So there's a new short I am planning - I'm doing it in HD that's for sure, it's right for the story I think. After a few peeks in this forum I've loosely settled on Sony F900 or F950 (haven?t gotten to knowing the difference yet), and I guess the first question I impatiently want to ask before I start bombarding these forums with more is: what is the daily or weekly or any kind of price for this camera? Oh, and I'm in London, BTW, so Londoners, please help.

Happy New Year and all, with a short delay,

Peter

David Mullen ASC · January 7, 2007

Since the F950 has no VTR (deck) built into the camera, you have to add the cost of renting whatever recording system you want to use.

Brian Drysdale · January 7, 2007

Usually the budget is tight on shorts, so unless you really need to shoot for effects shots I'd tend towards the F900 (the F950 body is a lot more expensive to rent, then you need to hire a VTR on top of that). Since you're in a PAL country you could also consider the HDW 750 (around £450 per day), which is cheaper to hire than the F900 (around £650 per day). The HDW 750 can shoot either 25p or 50i.

These rates excluded any lenses (around £150 to £175 per day for each zoom lens - you might 2 lenses: the wide angle zoom and standard zoom), lens accessories or monitor. The weekly rate is normally 4 times the weekly.

Best thing is to ring around a few rental companies and get some quotes. For a short, you can sometimes hire a camera package for less than the headline price.