Free Film School: Affordable HD Workflow

The first place you can save money in an HD workflow is with that camera purchase. There are a number of HD formats out there right now but only one offers both affordability and incredible quality. That format is HDV. HDV gear skews heavily toward the consumer market, which keeps the prices low. If you've read my technology posts you know I am madly in love with the Canon Vixia camera line. A used Vixia HV20 can be purchased these days at Amazon for $200. How can you go wrong at that price? The image is comparable to the hallowed Canon XH G1 and the HV20 is about 1/10th the price. Frankly, I recommend any camera in the Canon Vixia family. If you want to spend just a bit more the Canon EOS 60D runs about $700 with lens and is a phenomenal camera (you will want to pick up a Rode VideoMic and use it as your external microphone, since the EOS 60D only records mono sound). The next big ticket decision you have to make is which editing software suite to buy. I know, I know, the Earth won't continue to revolve unless you can use Final Cut Pro on your Mac. But have you seen how much you spent on your Mac? The turnkey price for a Final Cut Pro seat (G5 included) is $23,000. That's just nuts. In an earlier article I showed that you can make a decent HDV edit with Window Movie Maker HD, and that product is absolutely free (with the purchase of Windows Ultimate Edition). For this affordable workflow I am recommending you enroll in a community college class of your choice so that you can quality to buy the student version of Adobe Creative Suite. It's the best $600 you'll ever spend (it was briefly selling for as low as $299 if you happened to be enrolled at an Adobe partner school, but this page now tells you to sign up for the Creative Cloud and pay $30 a month instead). Finally you'll need something to power your NLE environment and for this workflow I am recommending the HP Pavilion Elite. It's the cheapest way to get your hands on a terabyte of RAID 0 disk and you get a great computer to boot. And believe me you'll need it. The Adobe Creative Suite system requirements are as follows:
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IntelŪ PentiumŪ 4 (3.4GHz processor for HDV)
2GB of RAM for HDV
Dedicated 7,200 RPM hard drive for DV and HDV editing; striped disk array storage (RAID 0) for HD