Cameras:
Our schedule was going to be really short and the entire movie was conversation based. For those reasons, I had a strong inclination to shoot with two cameras. Not only would it speed up our coverage, but it'd provide us with more natural cuts that would match perfectly when we put them together.
I also wanted to make this movie on a DSLR of some sort. Big cameras actually made for movies are cumbersome, difficult to use in small spaces, and usually your friends won't have one, which means renting instead of borrowing. Even if you do manage to find someone who will let you borrow it, you'll likely have only one lens to work with.
Photographers, however, always have a bevy of lenses. The advantage to shooting on a Nikon D90 or a Canon Mark II 5D or some other similar camera is that you can use all of the still photo Nikon or Canon lenses, and you probably know someone with a few of those.
After taking inventory, we found that our friends had a lot better models of cameras for this (The 5D and the Nikon 3000S, for example), but the only one of which we had a matching pair was the D90, so we went for it.
The D90 was one of the first DSLRs to do HD Video very seriously at all, so it has some issues. Overall, it's a great experience and worth doing, but in the interest of fairness, here are the worst things you'll deal with:
1) There is a maximum clip length of 5 minutes before it cuts automatically. This is not something that can be overridden, at least in any way I can find.
2) The reason for this is that it has an overheating problem. Recording video or using the live view (LCD screen on the back so you can see what you're shooting) causes the camera to heat up, and it will automatically shut off to prevent itself from getting fried internally. This is a nice feature in terms of not wanting your equipment to die, but it is frustrating when a combination of a long scene and hot lights cause it to cut in the middle of a shot.
3) Perhaps its worst flaw is that it only remembers its settings as long as the live view is on. So let's say the camera guys painstakingly set up the shot, get the colors and apertures all set, and then the director wants to talk through the scene with the actors. Unfortunately, you're going to want to click off the live view to prevent overheating later. When you click it back on, you'll find that it has forgotten everything you set up before. This meant setting and resetting the settings (wow, say "settings" much?) many times through the course of a scene.
4) This flaw is actually kind of a bonus as well, but the D90 shoots in only 720p. While that's no 1080p, it's actually way easier to edit. You don't have to render out a low res version to cut with, and it'll play a lot smoother on a decent computer system. Also nice is that Nikon's codec rules. I edited on Adobe Premiere, and with one simple free codec that I installed (PC only, Mac users, you're on your own), it was an absolute breeze. In my experience, Canon's files are a lot bigger in size and much more difficult to edit with. To give you an idea of how efficient these files are, all of the footage for my entire final runtime of 75 minutes movie is about 100 gigs. We shot HOURS of footage with a relatively small digital footprint.
I haven't yet tried it, but I understand the Nikon D3000s has fixed these problems. I'm pretty sure every DSLR has a little overheating trouble an a max clip length because of it, but the times have gotten longer than 5 minutes now.
So before you make your movie, or dump a bunch of money on some expensive P2 rig (or God forbid anything that shoots to tape, eww, gross), look around to see what DSLRs your friends have. You may be able to borrow or buy one that's MUCH cheaper than those bigger rigs and will provide you with way more flexibility.
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