Late-night story time!!

Ok, check this out.

I saw this really cool idea by a director on a fellow photographer’s blog to use the camera I have (the Canon 1D MkIII – a photo camera), with its truly staggering 10 frames per second, to produce an entire music video in a stop-motion style. Part of the difficulty in producing the video the way the director intended, was that he wanted to have off-camera, artificial lighting, firing together with the camera.

Now for those of you who are starting to get lost in my story, all cameras do this. All cameras that have a flash are capable of firing simultaneously with the camera.

ONCE.

Try it at 10 frames per second and what happens is that the flash can no longer keep up. The problem lies with the batteries, usually AAs, that run out of continuous juice after just a few shots. After that, you start noticing the flash skipping a frame, then two, then more, until you completely annihilate the batteries.

So the director’s solution was to just get a slew of really expensive battery packs called Profotos – every single one of which is more expensive than the camera itself – and had a giant crew milling around the camera operator, one to wirelessly pull focus, one to hold the light over the band/actors, another to wrangle cables, etc etc.

Giant production.

But it got me thinking… Ever since my house was broken into, I’ve missed having my video camera around. I haven’t replaced it, patiently waiting for Canon to please please, oh please announce a successor to my own camera model because it will, without a doubt, have HD video on it, like all other professional photo cameras coming from Canon and Nikon of late.

No luck on a successor to my model yet, but it’ll get there eventually.

In the meantime though…

Forget making a giant production like what that director did, forget off-camera lighting, forget big crews. I can direct again!

There is however one big problem with photo cameras shooting that fast.

Buffer.

The memory card that I slide into the camera has a limit in keeping up with how fast the camera is trying to capture data. Eventually, the memory card will simply say “busy” and a significant drop in the frame rate will occur.

So to figure out how long I could shoot before my memory card cut me off, I used my iPhone’s stopwatch to time how much “footage” I could capture before the memory card would quit on me.

Roughly 670 images within 46 seconds!

That’s awesome!! The 670 images is impressive, but the 46 seconds of “footage” is very useful. If I’m careful how I shoot, I could easily put together a music video, using natural light (ie. just the camera and nothing else). With a little more planning, I could possibly pull off a kind of “home movie” feel or footage that looks like stuff that was shot in the early days of film.

I don’t know if this is sinking in for any of my readers out there, but it’s blown me away. I was tired at 11pm and it’s now 1:30am and I’m bursting with ideas.

And speaking of how late it is, I didn’t pay attention to what I said until just now.

If my camera shoots 10 frames per second, and I shot for 46 seconds, why wouldn’t I have ended up with 460 pictures? Why 670? Probably user error, but it’s late and I do need sleep.