Online film-making comes of age

Confession time! I'm a bit slow to embrace the latest gimmicks and gadgets.

For years I resisted the movie mode in still cameras on the principle that if you fancy yourself as a Spielberg then you shouldn't be buying a Cartier-Bresson camera.

There are tools for the job, and there is no Swiss Army pocketknife camera that will do it all. Or so I thought!

I started to rethink our prejudices when the Nikon D90 popped up as the first DSLR with movie capture.

It offered middling high definition in a still camera, but when I tried it I was still not convinced. Canon followed the trend and I was moderately impressed with the 5D MkII's movie-making ability.

Then Panasonic really pulled a bunny from the hat with the Lumix GH1 micro four thirds camera. This camera delivers a decent movie-making mode with true 1080-line high-definition quality.

And its ace up the sleeve is its AVCHD recording format that permits immediate playback on a Panasonic TV or peripheral, such as a DVD or Blu-ray player, equipped with an SD card slot.

Olympus then entered the micro four thirds lists with the E-P1, which also does nice video, albeit at 720 lines; not quite up to the Panasonic standard, but still pretty good. And the Olympus does slightly better sound than the Panasonic, though neither is brilliant.

I was getting interested. Perhaps there is more to movie-making with a still camera than I had appreciated.

I am no longer in the realm of 640X480 pixels at a jerky 15 frames per second.

Then I had another epiphany. I stumbled across vimeo.com and our scepticism was gone forever. Vimeo is like an upmarket YouTube, except the small videos posted here are not of talking dogs and fat men being smacked in the goolies with a cricket ball. These are serious works that demonstrate just what is possible.

To have your breath taken away, look at Michael Fletcher's Images of the West Kimberley (vimeo.com/6639576) shot with the Canon 5D MkII.

It is a stunning illustration of what is possible with a still camera, a photographer's eye and imaginative post-production.

Then have a look at Philip Bloom's Joshua Tree (vimeo.com/4714724) created for the launch of the Panasonic GH1.

Mike Kobal's collection of videos (mikekobal.com/blog/) is made with several cameras - a Nikon D90, Canon 5D MkII, Panasonic Lumix GH1 and an Olympus E-P1.

It's obvious the camera is not as important as the creator's imagination and editing skill.

For Alina: A Retro Collage, he uses all the cameras to achieve his effects. And, in the process, he blows away our scepticism.

Movie mode works!

- © Fairfax NZ News