Small budget HD equipment advice needed

[Fabrice Ducouret]

Hello

 

I've been making Super-8 and 16mm and 35mm short films most of my life as a filmmaker and DP, and for the past few years I've started moving towards digital filmmaking.

At first I was using MiniDV but the quality was very cheap, so my equipment now is a Canon EOS Rebel T1i that I equip with old 1.4 lenses, and a Sony NEX 3 that I also equip with a bunch of old lenses some of which are handmade/modified lenses.

 

My question is this : Which one is the camera that I should use the most for my films?

The EOS has a 20 fps frame rate but a very large image (1920x1080) so maybe that's bad? I only have like three lenses that can go on it and the lenses I design cannot go on a camera with a mirror. Is it that bad to shoot 20 fps? I used to shoot 18 fps with super-8mm. Handheld, the images are too shaky.

The NEX has a better frame rate of 30 fps but the image is 1280 x 720, although I have way more lenses for it and most of the homemade lenses I build can go on it because it is mirror less. I've had issues with the compression, though, that make it annoying to use this camera. When handheld, the images aren't too shaky though.

 

I think maybe I should get a NEX-VG10? At the end of the day, I'd love to have a camera that's not too bulky and can shoot very good images, not too compressed, with an e-mount. Getting good sound isn't a priority. I also think it might be possible to get an external SSD recorder to plug in the HDMI of the Sony NEX, thus I would have an uncompressed image from the NEX?

 

At the end of the day, I've used more than 80 different cameras to make my films, and I feel like the search can be endless, although I know the content is what matters more than the tool. But please let me know what you think.