Are you setting up an in-house content setup to store video? Edit video? Shoot video? For what output format/playback environment? What resources do you already have that relate to the projects you want to be able to undertake? You have to be a lot more specific about the range of things you want to be able to do before one can begin to draw up a budget.

Ugh. I would leave the science to Wikipedia, not because it's not interesting (it is!), but because the author doesn't have a very good handle on the science. To wit:

"Shot noise isn’t an artifact of pushing the signal up." Correct.

"Shot noise comes from light itself." Not quite true: it comes from statistics. Both photons (from a light source) and electrons (within the imaging device), when counts are sufficiently small, can yield very different statistical results, just as a coin flipped only a few times may have a very different average of heads and tails compared to other small averages.

"Light, as you might remember from high school physics, is both a particle and a wave." True.

"Because light travels in a wave, it doesn’t consistently land in the same place all the time." It travels as both a particle and a wave. See above.

"With enough photons, light waves average out and precise images can be captured, but in low light situations, the nature of light waves reduces the precision of captured images." Exactly wrong. When photons are quantized, which means they are now acting as particles, statistics apply. In which case very small sample sizes can lean to very high standard deviations between successive measurements, which is shot noise.

"In low light scenarios, sometimes more light falls on a photosite, sometimes less. Hence, noise." That's a pretty weak explanation of the above.

"Since the various wavelengths of light have different amplitudes for their wave (wavelength and amplitude being related), we wanted to test various lighting scenarios in low light to see if we got differing levels of shot noise." Two things: (1) different wavelengths of light have different energies, according to the equation Energy = hν ( the frequency times Planck's constant). The concept of applying amplitude to photons is sufficiently complex that it won the Nobel Prize in 2012, and its basis and implications are far beyond the scope of this article. (2) Shot noise is a function of statistics. If you have a system capturing 1-100 red photons per unit of time and a system capturing 1-100 blue photons per unit of time, you'll see the similar amounts of shot noise. If there's an apparent difference in shot noise, chances are that either there's more blue photons hitting the sensor and filling the electron wells under the blue light condition than red photons hitting the sensor and filling the electron wells under the red light condition. Now, it might be that the lower energy level of red light is causing fewer electrons to fill the wells (due to the photoelectric effect), but at the end of the day, it's statistics that explain the differences.

The third video is a nice marriage of video and music. I would say that this video proves you can shoot and edit B-roll.

On the negative side, I would say that the first video forces the eye to work too hard to find the subject before it disappears. That is to say that each cut takes us to a frame that's sufficiently busy, and not sufficiently composed, that we don't know where to lock our gaze to see the subject. And as the subject comes into focus, there's too much ambiguity as to what we should be focusing on.

The second video is graded a bit too dark, and it also lacks a clear subject on which to focus.

The next step, of course, is to think about what you really want to say with your videos, and get that expressed, rather than trying to merely capture beauty in nature and hope that it can do all the work for you. You have to let your own voice speak!

The Crown is an amazing work by all: cinematography, writing, acting, set design, costumes, makeup, lighting, everything. That said, this essay makes a great point about how, amongst all that excellence, we can learn something important from just one aspect of one thing. Spot on!

The above comment is spam. Unfortunately NFS has yet to implement any kind of system for reporting bad posts, so the signal to noise ratio of these boards has dropped to basically zero. It was fun while it lasted. Now its just depressing.

Really great article! So many people think that the look of natural lighting comes from natural light only. This article really puts into perspective just how much thinking has to go into lighting to make it look like no thought went into it at all.