The money finally came in… and quickly went out as I splurged on some much needed hardware and software.

First up was the single most needed item – a real camera!

Bye bye lil’ webcam at last! :D

In the end, instead of the 200 to 300 quid I wanted to spend; it turned into 450 as I stumped up for a Canon HF100 flash based HD camera. What made me break the limit? A mic input! This means I’ll be spending on a tie-clip mic tomorrow and hopefully retiring my samson c03u mic from general use in the shows.

In the most recent show I used the onboard mic from the camera in order to gauge the capabilities (sucky!) which is why I’ll be looking for some mics to plug into it and didn’t sync up separate audio from my samson because of the next purchase…

A macbook and a copy of final cut express 4.

Yes, Vertical Slice has gone dirty and is no longer produced 100% on windows.

And because I had a whole new video editing app to contend with, I didn’t lump syncing audio onto my shoulders too – as it turns out, the only things to give me trouble were the differences in chroma keying and garbage matte between Premiere and Final Cut. That and a little flap about where the videos were hiding on the memory card – it wasn’t an outright video file, imovie nabbed them easily tho after Final Cut claimed there wasn’t any devices to capture from >.<

Still, the result of a brand new camera and editing platform can be seen here below… well worth it I think!

Oh, and I’ll post pictures of the latest edition uber shiny to my network. (the screen is the only thing I find annoying about this macbook!)