Not happy Jan

Last week I upgraded to a waterproof HD camera with a pistol grip. This was my first try at a proper HD vid:



Considering it was my first time with this camera I suppose I am being pretty hard on myself when critiquing it. However, I do truly hate this montage with a passion. The main reasons being:

1. The pistol grip cam won't mount properly - It wouldn't sit still for long on the tripod and kept coming loose every 5mins or so. I had a horrible time filming. The area I was taping was quite large and the action was fast so I didn't have time to keep adjusting it on the tripod mount. The damn thing has no hole for the tripod pin to stabilize it, only the screw. Actually, I'm still trying to figure out if I should drill one in.
   
   
2. Auto focus is awful when capturing scenes with fast action! You can clearly see that in this video. I still haven't tried playing with the shutter speed functions though, maybe that would've fixed the auto focus problems.


3. The joystick isn't ergonomic - The buttons are so fumbly that I would add to the camera shake by trying to man handle the controls to focus on the action quickly. Which added to my frustration on the day, because I had to follow high speed action over a large area with no second takes.


4. My PC is down to it's last 80gb of HDD space - Gasp :o I had Premiere (CS3) crash on me every time I worked on the vid, which is pretty uncommon. Surely that's just a CS4 trademark :) I actually had to start over again from scratch after the first project just shat itself and wouldn't render (it wouldn't even pre-render!). After that I saved multiple copies of the project as I went along under different names, and crashed maybe 5 times while exporting before I decided to clean up the project timeline a bit.
   


5. Could've done it with more style - Not only is the footage bad, but I went easy on the effects and got pissed off with the editing. If anything would've saved this project, it would've been VFX!!! I honestly just cracked it at the PC and gave up, my lack of HDD space crashing the old faithful just drove me bananas. Don't mind the new titles though, at least AE wasn't letting me down yesterday.

In my desperation I even tried using Total Media Extreme's Showbiz and Showbiz 2 to edit the footage, but that lead to more problems. Firstly, the first Showbiz is pretty damn crap, won't even let you lay down additional audio tracks (e.g. music) to go with the vision.

Secondly, Showbiz 2 won't do mp4 files. This cam saves onto SD cards in mp4 :\

I'm sick of my mediocrity right now. This vid = epic fail...