Welcome to the Darkside

Yes, it's happened. I went over to the Digital Darkside and got myself an HD-capable Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50. I learned from The Maz (Kelley Mazurowski) that this camera is great for shooting in HD. Also, it can be had for chicken feed! I found mine for $375 on Ebay, almost brand new. The seller said he had taken it out of the box and shot a few tests, then repackaged it and ebayed it right away - I suspect because of the well-known low-light problem the fz50 has. It doesn't perform well in low-light situations..... for this reason people do tend to buy them and then sell them off fairly cheap, which is a boon to us stopmotionistas. In our controlled-light environment we never need to worry about that particular problem. I ran across a few even cheaper, but from stores I don't trust, with names like Value Digital or Online Camera Store. Stay away from those deals that seem too good to be true... they usually are!

It's almost a DSLR... or rather it's what's known as a DSLR-like camera. Kel is in fact the one who posted about these vunderkams some time ago - LIO posted the info on his Digital Still-Cam Overview page. That monster lens.... no, it's not interchangeable like a real SLR lens, but it's a thing of absolute beauty... called a Leica lens - it's supposed to be excellent, and capable of everything from macro closeups to extended telephoto range. If that's not enough you can also buy add-on lenses to increase the range even tighter and farther. I had to also buy an AC adaptor, wired remote trigger, and an 8 gig SDHC card to store all those beautiful high-res images on {NOTE.... 8 Gigs is complete OVERKILL!!! You should never need more than a 2 gig card, maybe even less}. Just to archive the info while it's still fresh in my mind, I'll drop it in here. My research indicated you need a Panasonic card.... and that a Class 6 is the fastest for downloading to the hard drive, so that's what I bought. Also you want the more expensive Panasonic remote, rather then the cheap Chinese one that apparently tend to break easily. What I did was, after buying the camera through eBay (the tax rebate will cover this entire purchase... thanks GW!) I logged onto an online camera store and clicked up the Lumix camera, then opened the Accessories tab and found what I needed there, so it's all guaranteed to work with this particular cam.

One idiosyncrasy of this model is.... it has a live feed but it's analog.... meant to be run through a VCR or TV. That means it won't work with Dragon (which wants a USB feed) but I can run it through my Canopus Analog/Digital converter (that I've been using with my analog broadcast camera) to convert it to Firewire for Framethief. Then each time I snap off a shot on the framgrabber I also need to snap one onto the SDHC card using the wired remote trigger (so as not to bump the camera). This is a 10 MP camera (way too much for HD!!) but can also be used at 3 MP (perfect!). I'll be shooting Jpegs and then cropping to standard 1920 x 1040 widescreen size. The beauty of this is.... some time ago I realized the widescreen format would be perfect for this bar flick I'm getting ready to shoot. It's also just a format I love and want to use extensively.

Another camera that's good for stopmo is the Sony DSC-R1. I don't know much about this one, but it's also a great camera for shooting HD-ready stopmo, and can be bought nearly as cheap as the Lumix.

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I finally decided to go back through all my old posts from before Blogger had the Tags, and add tags to the important ones. As a result, I've been able to post 2 new links under Resources.... Building the Radke Puppets part 1 & 2. Something I've been wanting to do for a long time now. I had to break it into 2 because the Tag Search function only shows 20 posts, and still I had to remove a few of the non-essential posts to make it all fit.