Filmmaker Brian Dalton is preparing for season three of his online video series Mr. Deity, for which Dalton wears the hat of writer, director, cinematographer, editor, composer, producer, and actor. The series was recently given distribution via Sony's Crackle website, and it can also be found on mrdeity.com. Dalton discusses creating and producing the web-based project with Craig Erpelding. For more on Dalton, visit his Reel-Exhange profile at reel-exchange.com/members/676edd46/profile.

What camera do you use and how do you shoot knowing that primary distribution is via the Web — what about encoding?

Dalton: We shoot on Panasonic AG-HVX200s. Sometimes we shoot one camera at a time. Sometimes we shoot with multiple cameras. For the first season, we shot with the Redrock M2 35mm adapter, but for the Web and with the white background, etc., it just wasn't worth the hassle. We shoot in 720p at 24fps in DVCPRO HD. Crackle.com encodes the show now, and for them, I just give them the actual 720p master in DVCPRO HD. But when we were encoding the show ourselves, we'd just shoot it directly out of [Apple] Final Cut Pro at 640×360 using H.264, 24fps, and I'd take the audio down to AAC VBR 96kbps-128kbps at 32K. That's the file we'd upload to YouTube and iTunes.

Read the rest of Dalton's Q&A at reel-exchange.com/insider/brian_dalton.

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