I’ve been play­ing around with video all week­end, try­ing to get a bunch of things work­ing to no avail, when real­ly what I want­ed to do was just do some edit­ing and get a project under my belt.

Among the prob­lems:

• My Canon HF100 shoots in a pseu­do 24p, which does­n’t get import­ed into Final Cut Pro as true 24p. This means I have to con­vert the video from the cam­era to ProRes, then con­vert to 24p, then bring it back into Final Cut Pro, then begin my edit­ing. Too bulky a work­flow for my tastes.
• Rendering a few min­utes of video will take sev­er­al hours. So I have to leave the ren­der­ing on overnight, occa­sion­al­ly into the next day, which means I can’t use my lap­top until it’s done. Thank god I have two com­put­ers.
• Clips in the Final Cut time­line become unplayable when using Magic Bullet for colour tints, due to dropped frames.. This means I have to do all my edit­ing, mak­ing sure all the tim­ing is per­fect, then add the colour effects to it, then ren­der. It’s a leap of faith, because I can’t pre­view motion with the colour; if I don’t end up lik­ing the effect, I have to re-ren­der the whole thing again.

I hate giv­ing up these things, but see­ing as how I’ve spent count­less hours research­ing and exper­i­ment­ing for solu­tions with­out any luck, I think I’ll have to for now. Hopefully full-frame sen­sors will become cheap enough that reg­u­lar con­sumers (like me) can afford them, and maybe video stan­dards will actu­al­ly be more stan­dard. Until then, I’ll have to accept this “high­ly-rat­ed” cam­corder that still lacks a man­u­al focus ring, can’t pro­duce any kind of shal­low DOF with bokeh, and has an annoy­ing amount of low-light noise.

On the non-tech­ni­cal end of video, one of the dif­fi­cul­ties is that I’m always torn between telling a sto­ry, and sav­ing a mem­o­ry, both of which seem some­what mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. The for­mer tends to be more con­cise but cold and mechan­i­cal, where­as the lat­ter is filled with all the lit­tle details I enjoy but poten­tial­ly bor­ing.

Video is also less for­giv­ing, as fram­ing is more final with­out the crop­ping func­tion of still pho­tos. Then when you move into high def­i­n­i­tion, things like dirt on a car, blem­ish­es on a face, stray hairs, become much more noticeable…and invari­ably end up dri­ving a per­fec­tion­ist like me crazy.

I still love the com­bi­na­tion of move­ment and sound and dia­logue that video affords though; it’s the medi­um that I find comes clos­est to real life.