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CHAPTER ONE ..BUYING A CAMCORDER.
Before you pick out a camcorder, and hand the man your credit card, you should have a good idea of how you want to use it. If you do a lot of traveling, and want to shoot video the way your revered father shot home movies, (only hopefully better,) you may want a small, light, fully automatic unit that will fit into your luggage, be there when you need it, and not make a big production out of using it.
If you plunge for one of these lightweights, you had better practice holding it steady, especially on long shots, or your audience will sneak out on you the way they did on dear old Dad with his underexposed, out-of-focus movies. The larger, heavier camcorder that will rest on your shoulder is much easier to hold steady, but if it is home in the closet while you are basking on the beach at Nice, what is the advantage? The person shooting video on his vacation is never going to get the quality that the professional film crew achieves with their tripods, lights, reflectors and $ 30K Betacams, so he should go after the material they can't get.. the family activities of friends, etc. The most interesting home video I have seen was sent to a U. of W. student by his family in Malaysia. If, on the other hand, your interests lean more to video production, and hopefully to making a few bucks, then go back and look at that big heavy camcorder, and a good tripod to put it on. The features that you look for will be a little different. If you have to get a camcorder with a built in titler, make sure you can turn it off. The date and time is bad in the first few seconds of a production, and when it goes on for an hour or more, it is a disaster. Automatic focus is nice if you have good batteries, lots of light, and don't have too many butterflies going between you and the subject. Automatic exposure also is fine if you can remember not to line up your in-laws in front of the windows at that wedding reception. Automatic white balance is a blessing, and gets away from the red and green pictures of the home movie days, but there might be a time when you would want to over-ride it. Image stabilization is available on some camcorders and is worth the extra cost. It will not work miracles, but it will help make your pictures more steady and watch able. One essential feature to look for is a jack for an external microphone. You will get much better recording with a microphone close to the person speaking, than with the built-in camcorder mike which tends to pick up more room noise. Line level audio and video inputs, if you can get them, will allow you to use the camcorder as a VCR to copy tapes, a big advantage if the camcorder has flying erase heads and your VCR doesn't. Line outputs are more common, and also very handy, for they will allow you to copy tapes to your VCR. Now, after all this, what format to buy? You have six choices, assuming you are not going to mortgage the family homestead and go broadcast.
VHS has been around since the early 1970's. It is the most common, and you can always find something to play it back on. The disadvantages are severe color bleeding, and deterioration in quality from one generation to the next. VHS-C is a small VHS cassette which is limited to twenty minutes at standard speed. (You can get more at slow speed, but don't because you get higher quality and better transfer from one machine to another at the standard speed, and with VHS you need all the help you can get. S-VHS and S-VHS-C. Same as above with much higher quality on the FIRST generation. Generation loss and color bleeding persist. 8MM video. Small size, 2 hours recording time, good quality video and sound. The disadvantages are that you have to play back on the camcorder or buy an 8MM VCR. Also, the tapes being smaller, are more subject to drop-outs. (White horizontal lines in the picture, equivalent to scratches on film.) HI-8MM video. Extremely good quality possible. Used by the TV networks in some applications. At the present time the cassettes are the weak point, and drop-outs are a real problem. Digital video was introduced in 1986 for broadcast use in about five formats. Within the next two years industrial and consumer digital video tape machines began to appear. The most popular are camcorders using "Mini DV" tape. This is smaller than an 8 millimeter tape and can provide sixty minutes of high quality recording at a price about four times that of a good VHS tape. The advantage to digital recording is that there is little or no generation loss of quality. The disadvantage is that the tapes are delicate and easily damaged. The experts claim that for important work they should be used only once, then retired. Well, that's about it. You pays your money and you takes your choice, but as you hand over your credit card to the smiling man and take delivery of your new camcorder, just think for a minute of what W. Shakespeare wouldn't have given for that opportunity. |
