My friend Dean recently bought the new Nikon D90 DSLR with HD video capability. His company Dean's Photography Services owns many DSLRs and his justification for the purchase was to be able to shoot short videos for some of his clients. He went along on a recent shoot as PA and to take some stills. He also wanted to shoot some HD video that I might be able to use.
Yesterday he came over with the camera to see how the footage looked and how it would import into FCP. The Motion JPEG AVI clips imported into FCP with no problem, but when I placed them into an empty timeline FCP did not ask me if I wanted to conform the sequence to match the clips. Item properties reveals the codec to be Apple OpenDML JPEG with a data rate of 2.4 MB/sec (An Apple Codec in an AVI wrapper?). The audio is 16bit, 11.025 kHz, mono. A render or intermediate transcode would be necessary. Upon playing the 720P, 24fps footage I noticed a couple of things. First of all it looked a bit soft. Kind of mushy or painted. Dean said that he might have missed focus a bit. The other thing I noticed was that the apeture was pumping in auto mode. I suggested manual settings and Dean said he wasn't sure you could in the video mode. We decided to take the camera outside and run a test on focus and exposure. Here is what we discovered:
1.You cannot engage auto focus. Manual focus is your only option.
2.There are no focus aids as in the still mode so you have to eyeball it.
3.You cannot use the optical viewfinder at all.
4.You cannot override the auto aperture and it tended to over expose a bit.
5.And of course you are limited to 24fps.
We viewed the carefully focused footage and it still looked soft and mushy. Dean's white shirt was blown out. Here is a link to the full size image
www.leebergermedia.com/temp/DSC_0001.jpg
One glaring drawback was the lack of connectors for an external microphone. There is a small electret condenser mic on the body.
Our conclusions? The D90 is an excellent 12 Megapixel still camera. The HD video function could be useful in some non critical situations as a B cam or on an informal shoot as the A cam. What I'm hoping is that it is the precursor to even better DSLR's that can shoot HD video.
