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Depending on how much footage students plan to shoot at one time, you may wish to buy additional Class 10 SD card(s) of your own in denominations of 16 GB or more from Lexar or Sandisk. To give a sense of scale, one hour of footage shot at maximum quality takes about:
-21 GB of space on SD/SDHC/SDXC card on a Canon 60D or
-11 GB of space on SD/SDHC card on a Sony HXR-NX5U (More about these figures in "tapeless workflow," below.)
Students wishing to buy their own PCM-based audio recorder might wish to consider a model with XLR inputs, such as the Zoom H4n available from the CAMS Production Office. IMPORTANT: devices such as the Edirol R-09 or Tascam [DR-05|http://tascam.com/product/dr-05/specifications/], DR-07 or DR-08 might suffice for homework assignments but not Comps projects. These devices have 1/8" mini phono plug inputs and not XLR inputs. It's possible to purchase XLR-to-1/8" adapters and physically connect a professional mic. However, one test made with such a device and several mics in a suitably quiet environment produced a recording with a level of self-noise accompanying signal that would be unacceptable in a professional production setting. The device fared much better using its built-in mics on stereo mode, with special care to noise generated by handling the device.
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11. I will not bring food or drink of any kind into the Media Lab (136 Weitz) except during receptions such as orange couch sessions.
IV. tapeless workflow
These cameras record video to SD cards. Each camera shoots footage that's compressed differently. The best practice is to keep these camera files safe, both to use now and keep safe for later in case we want to use them in a different way.
Before we walk though workflow for each camera, it's important to understand what a codec is. "Codec" is an abbreviated way of referring to compression and decompression. People who work at places such as the Frauenhofer Institute use color science and the psychology of perception to come up with ways to throw away data in a video signal in a way that only shows up a little bit on close inspection in ways we all hope our audience never sees, then reconstitute the video image into a much larger file when it's time to do something like edit it. QuickTime (.MOV) is not a codec but a container. An .MOV file, sometimes also referred to as a wrapper, may contain video made with one of a large number of codecs, including highly compressed codecs, such as MPEG-4 and its variant H.264, or very mildly compressed codecs such as Apple ProRes or DVCPro.
A. Sony NX5U
1. what the camera shoots
a. MPEG transport stream (.MTS files), contained in folders with specific names
b. this takes up c. 11 GB of space on SD card per hour of footage shot at maximum quality and resolution (actual figures may vary).
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3.
B. Canon 60D
1. what the camera shoots
a. H.264 in a QuickTime wrapper
b. this takes up c. 21 GB of space on SD card per hour of footage shot at maximum quality and resolution (actual figures may vary).
2.
3.
V. other useful things
A. Cinema and Media Studies' Gould Guide, by Matt Bailey, Carleton College Media Librarian and Reference & Instruction Librarian for Arts
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