Chapter 6: Capture and Output Using DV Camcorders

Chapter 6

Capture and Output Using DV Camcorders

Since their introduction in the late 1990s, DV camcorders have become the favored choice for millions of home video enthusiasts. These camcorders have become inexpensive the low-end models retail for about $300 and are more reliable than their analog counterparts. They also have some features that leave analog camcorders far behind. First among these is that they are entirely digital devices. A digital camcorder is essentially a custom computer, designed to capture video imagery and audio, which it converts to a digital data stream. This stream is then written to a high-density storage medium, such as miniDV, DVCAM, Digital8, DVCPRO, and MicroMV tape formats. Some digital cameras will encode their media streams as MPEG data and write it to a removable disk drive or a recordable DVD in real-time. Because a DV camcorder creates digital data rather than an analog broadcast TV signal, these devices are uniquely compatible with personal computers, and since their introduction, many software packages have been developed to allow consumers to create their own movies, using nothing more than a DV camcorder, a PC, and some software.

The capability to produce broadcast-quality television (or even feature films) at home is a big deal. Mainstream theatrical films have been created using DV camcorders, saving millions of dollars in production costs versus comparable films made using wet process movie cameras and film. One of the biggest expenses in filmmaking (other than paying for big-name stars and scores of fancy special effects) is the cost of developing film. This cost vanishes with digital video, and a new generation of filmmakers have eagerly adopted DV as their medium of choice. It s cheap, it looks great, and the filmmaker can do all the post-production on a typical computer. What s more, for folks lucky enough to be using a prosumer model digital video camera such as Sony s $1800 DCR-TRV950 the quality of the images will be almost indistinguishable from a $35,000 high-end digital camera. Both CNN and ABC s Nightline now equip their field correspondents with these cheap, high-quality digital cameras, which give them the ability to shoot footage easily, nearly anywhere.

Microsoft DirectShow provides the operating system resources to handle these camcorders, both the high-end models and the more consumer-oriented devices. Furthermore, DirectShow is well-engineered to deal with DV streams, either presented through a hardware device (a camcorder) or through a disk-based file. A nice collection of source capture and transform filters makes working with DV a straightforward affair easier, in many ways, than working with a webcam.