Amity

Last weekend Alejandro Adams and I shot tests and actor auditions at one of his satellite offices (an alcove in Starbucks in Mt. View). I showed up with my HPX170, a high definition camera, which threw a monkey wrench into Alejandro’s workflow. You see, despite the world shifting around him, Alejandro insists on shooting his films in DV standard definition on his DVX100, which he goes out of his way to verbally abuse, calling it “obsolete” and “only worth $15 bucks” (despite the fact that Panasonic still manufactures and sells it for considerably more than that).  He says he has his reasons.  Yet, always one for experimentation, Alejandro agreed to allow me to use my HPX170 as one of the cameras on the film (as long as I took an oath that I would indeed shoot in SD mode); however, the thought of a tapeless camera seemed to make him a little queasy.

For what it’s worth, I did some informal tests to see how close these two cameras could match up. My results showed they can be made to look nearly identical with minor changes to the settings. That the successor cameras to the DVX seem to cling so closely to its same fundamental architecture, look and feel says to me there is nothing obsolete about Alejandro’s technical considerations. For the technical (geeky?) details, click on the graphic below for a full sized image.