I made a real rookie mistake this weekend.

Filming my interview for Assessment 2, I sat down ahead of time with my camera and set the white balance, focus, aperture and shutter speed — all the things we went through in our in-class camera exercise. Everything looked good, I recorded a little 10-second test video and played it back on the camera, and it looked perfect… so, we got stuck into the interview.

But when I dumped the footage to my computer, it looked like this:

I did a bit of googling and found out that the green blocks are sections of the video where image data is missing, through some kind of codec error/mismatch. I’m still not 100% sure exactly what caused the problem in the first place, but had I dumped the test footage to my laptop first I would have noticed it and been able to fix it.

So, the lesson: always dump some test footage to your laptop and make sure it works before filming anything.

Luckily I was interviewing a subject I have easy access to, so I was able to ask her to come back the next day and re-record the interview. I changed the recording format to AVCHD on the camera, and this time it worked fine — no green blocks in sight.

I’m just glad I made this mistake now, with a subject I have easy access to, rather than later in semester with a subject I couldn’t ask to come back and re-record an entire interview.