As a competent photographer making a living from weddings and family photography, I have always had a sneaking desire to make film clips. I have borrowed a camcorder a couple of times over the last 20 years but never owned one because I always thought carrying it around would conflict with my stills shooting. We do now have a GF1 (and a G1) and I have had a bit of fun making short clips, though I've not tried any editing yet. Going back at least 15 years I have imagined making productions containing short film clips of say 5 seconds, freezing into a perfect still image, and I can see now that that is possible using the new range of DSLR's. I should add that we also have a 5D mk2 though have not used it for video yet. These productions would be mainly personal work, though I can see it might be useful for the weddings as well even though I do not intend to become a full time wedding videographer.
An imminent two week cycling holiday to Costa Rica has made me decide to take the Panasonic m4/3 cameras and lenses due to their lightweight design and I am trying to decide whether to bite the bullet and get a new GH2 so that I can make some short films of the trip as well as my usual stills stuff.
A few questions.
What would be a good piece of software for me to do basic editing with. We use Macs so do have iMovie, though not the latest version yet. At the moment I'm not sure if I have the time to learn a lot of complicated software, though I am aware I may eventually get pulled into it. So far I have used the mpeg format on the GF1. Is this good enough, and if I use the AVCHD format will it be complicated to view and edit? Regarding sound, which is something completely new to me, would the microphone on the camera give reasonable quality, or is there a benefit in having a separate sound recorder and putting them together in the editing? Good sound is another thing I have always been interested in.
As a fairly knowledgeable photographer I can see this comes across as "I have just decided I want to be a photographer and can anyone tell me what camera to buy, how to use it and should I use iPhoto or get straight into RAW and Lightroom from the outset" kind of post - so please be gentle with me! I appreciate that I cannot be a Spielberg yet, but just want to have a go and see where it takes me.
Jim