shooting video with Pentax kx

tell me everything you know please...
I'll be comparing a kx to a kr soon enough and want to focus on the video capabilities of each...

Can't give you any K-x experience Don, but what I can share about the K-7 may help?

Check the gallery link in my sig, in there is a video of the speeches of a friends wedding 2 weeks ago. It was a spur of the moment decision to film it as there was no one else with a video camera, and it wasn't that easy. No tripods, no mics, no pre-planning or thought went into it!!

As we know, there is a limit on the length of each shot you can take, partly due to import duty classification, and as I found, sensor heating. It was obvious pretty soon that I would have to alternate between cameras, leaving one to cool down whilst shooting with the other. This involved a lot of memory card and camera swapping with the wife to ensure we managed to record everything.

Observations:-

Shot at 720P
1x K-7 with DA* 16-50
1x K-7 with DA* 50-135
around 43-44 minutes of footage
10 files (so 9x camera swaps!)
total of around 15GB of footage!
focussing is critical
handholding a DSLR with a 50-135 and trying to keep in focus is not easy!

Having shot weddings (video) as a teenager, there is no way I would shoot a whole wedding with them, no way. Have experience of 2 hour church services and speeches going on for over 90 mins and I think that DSLRs just can't cope yet.

Best advice I can give is to use them as additional (video) cameras to what you already have and specifically to low light, depth of field and unusual (fisheye?) type shots and keep shooting the majority of 'normal' footage with 'normal' video cameras.

If you have the man power (and the balls!!) to try and shoot a wedding video solely with the DSLRs then I would probably suggest buying 3 or 4 identical models and make sure you have a bloody good assistant or 2 with you!

Hope that helps a bit with what to expect even if I can't give any direct experience with a K-x!

Well I shoot with both still and video so I'm particularly interested manual controls, specialty lenses like the fisheye zoom, dof with the 50 1,4, and 85mm soft.....

I have video cams, but I'd like to add something xtra for those b-roll shots.....
a decent wide angle lens, fisheye etc for video can cost as much or more than the kx... I've been putting off buying for a while now... waiting for the next round of announcements....
thnx

The market is certainly getting more interesting!

Expecting we will get 1080P 24 in the K-5, manual controls I'm not sure we'll get. Would have thought K-5 would be better for you for 1080P? Or you thinking 2x K-r for the same price, 720P fine for now?

As for the something extra, definately. Easy to do too, especially if you relegate the current K10/K20 to the backup bag and are shooting all your stills with the new video enabled DSLRs. Just takes the twist of a dial!

Looking forward to seeing what you can do with them!

gotta be honest here...
1080i 30, 1080p 60, 720p 24 or 30..... It doesn't matter much in the final product..
most wedding clients want it on standard dvd...
between standard dvd upsampled for hdtv's, or mp4 at 720p for digital playback....
nobody is coming back screaming "this sucks! we want blue-ray or death!"

I don't think it really matters for my purposes...
What matters is lighting, sound and composition.
Content is king.

How much resolution do people really need? 720p is excellent and much better than terrestrial broadcasts and video footage of even a short while ago. Anything more and the time and expense of transferring / storing / editing footage becomes prohibitive. I'm not saying that there isn't a place for 1080 but it's not the solution to all problems.

More difficult is learning the art of video and putting together a rig. Do you need a shoulder harness? External monitor? Focus puller?

I put together my first film with the K-x and am very impressed. Being able to use all my brilliant lenses to make video is an astounding advance over the crap zooms in most low-end video cameras.

That said, if the K-5 has manual control that will be a killer feature.

rparmar....
what are the camera controls/options with the kx? manual aperture shutter, iso?
any videos I can check out?

You set the aperture and ISO ahead of time and the video then stays locked to that. Manual focus like in real cameras. Good for controlled work on tripod or in studio. Sorry, no samples to share (yet) but I am sure a search will turn some up.