Tamworth Freight In HD (In The Pissing Rain!) | Wednesday 4th June 2014

(Best viewed in 1080p HD full screen mode) *unfortunately, I allowed Youtube to edit this and I personally think its made it worse......especially the first shot! its a testing day video, so will leave it up*

Ok, so yesterday was a chance to test out the new video camera, Panasonic HC-X920, along with RODE mic and XGrip rig.

The whole video is unedited clips throughout the day and was a chance to use the manual mode settings, playing with Speed shutter and Iris settings, predominantly staying around F2.8 1/250 sec. A fair bit of zebra pattern within the screen but the sky was so white and the weather crap, it was difficult to know what the best setting was. Lost count the number of times I had to wipe the lens!

The weather was bloody horrible, continuous rain, albeit light and heavy, some angle shots proved to be better than others.

RealTimeTrains wasn't working 100% today so a number of trains were missed, light engine 47 to Norwich and light engine 56 to Derby and finally the tube stock but at Tamworth, you're lucky if you get it all, especially when under foot is sodden!

Certainly some good lessons learned from the exercise, main one...... DO NOT turn off the mic to save battery because as you'll find out on clip 4 and the last 6 clips towards the end, forgot to switch it back on, so apologies for the lack of sound at the end. Where the mic was on, the best capture with the RODE was definitely 70015 on the Leeds - Soton on the top level, it caught the screaming from the loco superbly.

Overall,happy with the camera, all we need now is a bit more practice with holding the rig and getting the optimum settings, then I think we'll get the best from this superb camera.

Will be interesting how the shunting at Bridgwater and departure of the flasks comes out but that may be some time before I capture them as they seem to be running on Tuesdays again, damn!

Enjoy and feel free to comment (and like of course!)