Being in this studio and experiencing Ex3 along with other equipments, I asked myself, is it worth it? I mean this piece of equipment is worth around Aud 10,000 and price increases with the additional of other equipments like sound mixer, tripod, and sound recorders. I looked over my DSLR Nikon D600 attached to it is a 24-70mm 2.8F lens and tested its video capabilities. It pretty much matches the quality of video with Ex3 and at some instances has lower noise level than Ex3, due to the fact Ex3 has a smaller sensor size (1/2″) than D600’s which is a full frame sensor (35mm). Don’t get me wrong, but DSLR does have its advantages, for example, it offers full HD recording option, having a sensor size much bigger than a camcorder, provides a great quality of image. Secondly you can be versatile with different lens in the market from fish eye lenses to extreme telephoto lens. Thirdly, DSLR has better depth of field control, you can create a narrow area in focus and a wide area in sharp quality as often seen the films and lastly like i mentioned before, it does offer amazing image quality in low light situations where these camcorders fall back hard.

That being said, by flipping the other side of the coin, you will see that everything that shines is not gold. DSLR does have its disadvantages as well. The first being the focus issue, it becomes difficult to get a precise focus by using the DSLR live LCD screen, whereas the camcorder allows us to zoom to our subject and get the exact focus which we want. Secondly, DSLR has lack of controls, for example DSLR doesn’t have peaking and zebra functions (until recently Panasonic GH4 launched these functionality), these functions are necessary to get the right focus and highlight areas of the frame and along with that DSLR does not output great sound quality unless you plug in an external microphone and with the mixer (industry practises this way so doesn’t matter much). It also excludes the ability to manually adjust audio levels (channel setting included) and built in density filters as well. Lastly, it offers limited recording at a time in between 12-30 minutes (which is plenty if you are shooting for a film or documentary) and it’s not comfortable for making movies because a DSLR is designed for taking pictures and not video making.

Even though keeping in mind the disadvantages of a DSLR, it’s not a matter of worry now a days since the inception of Magic Lantern software (Canon users only) as it offers all the audio and video controls it needs for today’s professional use. So to conclude and it is my personal opinion, being a student, budget will always be my concern and I will always prefer DSLR due to its portability and as technology is improving, so will the features and requirements of filmmaking in DSLR. With DSLR usage in feature films like ‘Like Crazy’ 2011 won Grand Jury prize at Sundance Film Festival and in popular season ‘Dexter’ season 7, Nikon D800 was used, the camera operator was so impressed with the image quality that they decided to use the compressed H.264 in built of camera,“… we really couldn’t see much difference. But our jaws really hit the floor when we brought up the compressed D800 footage,” Fletcher adds. “Right then the decision was made with the post supervisor Megan Walsh that if we shoot with this camera, there is no need to shoot uncompressed. That means the file size goes from 4GB to 600 MB. That’s just the factory setup, too.” So I’m sure that with improvements coming along, DSLR will one day, be the choice of filmmakers choice of equipment. That being said, in the end, the equipment doesn’t matter, the product in the end does.

References:

1,http://www.imdb.com/list/ls059550382/

2,http://news.doddleme.com/equipment/nikon-quietly-getting-some-love-in-hollywood/