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With 960x540 CCDs. Getting 1080p out of CCDs with a quarter of the resolution of an HD frame is... interesting. The actual measured resolution of the HVX footage is lower than the Z1, which is itself lower than the XLH1.

Low-res, noisy CCDs and the hassle of having to transfer footage to a laptop every four minutes? To be honest, it seems like a rather bizarre choice given your list of uses up above. Do you really want to have to stop every interview after four minutes to transfer all the footage to a laptop?

Ideally it would take a week or so, after you've spent a few months working out the characters and story. Most of us aren't that well-organised though. I believe TV show writers (at least in the UK) generally get two or three months from idea to finished scripts, or if you were writing...

I doubt it: from what I've seen it's very restrictive. You can only stick together pre-programmed shots, so if the camera angle is wrong or the action is wrong, you're stuffed.

Yeah, sound design can be one of the most creative jobs on a movie: particularly as it rarely costs millions of dollars to add the right sounds to a scene, unlike visual effects, and adding the right sounds can significantly change the way that a scene plays.

The best way to become a screenwriter is: Write. Going to the right school will certainly help make contacts to get your scripts noticed, but if you can write great scripts then people will buy them and hire you to write for them in future. Other than the contacts, you'd probably do just as...

You can record sound on anything, but you'll have to sync it up to the video afterwards.

Good point: I'd never considered the benefits of analogue audio recording when you have loud noises like that. DAT and DV recording peaks horribly if the audio signal is too much for the recorder, but presumably the Nagra will still record some detail even when the signal is very loud.

It is, for people who think that movies are all about pictures. Your audience will complain far less about a movie with good sound shot on VHS than a movie with bad sound shot on IMAX, but most low-budget movie skimp on sound in favor of picture.

DAT is Digital Audio Tape: basically CD quality on tape. Nagra is an older very high quality analogue tape recorder that was used for movies before DAT became popular. Don't know what an FR-2 is :).

Probably because bad sound is one of the biggest faults of student and amateur movies, and it's not hard to avoid with some forethought: like checking the locations aren't too noisy before you shoot there. For example, one student short I recorded sound on they'd chosen to shoot a scene outside...

Depends. Doing it in the camera will give you the best possible quality, but restricts your choice later on. Doing it in post will lose image quality, but you can change your mind and do something completely different if the need arises.

Most movies by John Boorman: he usually doesn't stop talking until the very end of the credits. Lloyd Kaufman's recent DVDs have feature-length 'making of' documentaries which are often better than the movies and show a lot of the problems that come up when working with inexperienced crews on...

Personally, I would always take a video camera to the location you're going to shoot and get some footage beforehand. Not only will you be able to get some idea of how it looks on screen, but any background noise will be very obvious when you play it back on your TV. Even better is to take your...

Well, I haven't used them, but I believe you're currently limited to about four minutes per card which means you need to drag someone else along to keep copying the footage from the cards to a laptop, and then hope that the laptop disk doesn't crash or provide a tape drive to back it up. Also...

Before spending money on an HVX200 you might want to read what users have been saying about it. For example, it reportedly has a lower resolution than the Sony HDV cameras (which isn't surprising as the CCDs are low resolution), and a noisy picture: then there's the delights of P2 to worry about.

Yeah, true: even airsoft guns can cause permanent damage to eyes or other sensitive parts of the body. Also, if you let the actors look after the guns they're using they have a tendency to go wandering around the location with a realistic-looking gun in their hand in order to 'get into...

Basically it looks like a fancier version of HDV recording to disk with bigger CCDs and interchangeable lenses.

Yeah, I couldn't handle Edition for long: it was far too buggy for my taste. I used it to get a cheap upgrade to Avid Xpress Pro when Avid were doing a competitive upgrade deal :). Avid have a free downloadable editor for DV, but it lacks a lot of features (most importantly, you can't transfer...

It's not just the codec, it's the bit-rate. Reduce the bit-rate and you'll reduce the size of the file, but lose some picture quality in the process.