Camera problems

Ok, first major problem. The guys at Nick really liked the idea of the characters in a moving live-action video. Only problem is that we need a HD camera to match the HD renders of the characters. Also, Maya doesn't feature a great decoder so once a render is made with a background video, the quality of the background will decrease a bit, so we need to get our hands on the best source video we can.

We managed to rent a HD camera for a few days, with batteries and a tripod. We managed to connect successfully connect the camera to the laptop to allow us to record directly into Windows Movie Maker without any quality loss but the silly camera refused to enter record mode without a tape inserted into the camera rendering the camera useless to us as finding a DVCPRO tape proved to be harder than finding any meat in a MacDonald’s Mc’Chicken Sandwich (sorry I’ll end the jokes now). I mean we travelled miles to every electronics store in the area and most people acted like I’d just made up a tape format that doesn't exist. Some guy at Curry’s said "I just work here; I don't know what DV tapes are".

I found some tapes on some dodgy website for £20 which I'm not trusting so I asked my housemates who do Broadcast what they do- they said that they borrow tapes from their teacher.