As anyone who has read my previous blogs can tell you, I am currently in the process of setting up my production company. This has lead me to explore and purchase cameras and computers and below are my thoughts on what I have purchased so far, you don’t need to spend thousands if you now where to go and don’t mind having to upgrade when the funds are available!

I actually bought my G4 power mac from ebay, and so far it is working wonders. the specs were OK, 1.5 mhz, 1gb RAM and an 80gb hard drive. I had to get the operating system, monitor and other accessories elsewhere but still for £95 I sure as heck am not going to complain. The seller, whose id escapes me, was very quick in delivery and thus far the only problem I’ve had is running final cut studio. But I think that is down to the graphic card and not will be remedied shortly. I love living with a computer nerd who can upgrade me cheaply.

I also run a Toshiba laptop I bought this at the beginning of the year and once again it runs beautifully and was my editing machine for experiments before i bought the mac. The only reason I switched to mac for editing purposes was because I like final cut and can’t get on with editing software on the PC, you might be able to but for me, I prefer MAC’s. The laptop is currently used for the task of converting the HD video into a format that the mac can read, I know there is software out there that can do this, but as mentioned earlier, I’m upgrading soon so prefer to use the software xilisoft, it converts the source material into a variety of different formats and I reccomend it to everyone who needs to convert HD video.

Finally we come to my favorite purchase; the camera. Again I was smart about this and bought during a sale at Argos. I went for the JVC GZ-HD10. Its beautiful little camera and comes with a 40 hour recording ability. Having worked with both DVD and mini DV cameras in the past I’m so glad to have the hard drive now. This isn’t the most amazing camera on the market but for my first few jobs, where I can see myself having to move around a lot, its perfect. Recording in true 1080 high definition the controls are very simple to use and apart from having to convert the video from .MTS to AVI for editing i have no problems with it.

This wasn’t intended to be an in depth review of any of these products, more a spend a little wisely, rather then a lot foolishly kind of thing.

I post some edited footage just as soon as i can

Image via Wikipedia