1.2. Buying a DV CamcorderIf you already own a DV camcorder, you can safely skip to the next chapterunless you've always wondered what this or that button on your camcorder does. In that case, surveying the following pages may enlighten you. 1.2.1. DV Camcorder Features: Which Are Worthwhile?Like any hot new technology, DV camcorders started out expensive ($2,500 in 1996) and continue to plummet in price. At this writing, basic models start at $350; prosumer models hover around $2,000; many TV crews are adopting $3,500 models like the Canon XL1 or Sony's high-definition FX1; and the fanciest, professional, commercial- filmmaking models go for $10,000. All of these camcorders are teeming with features and require a thick brochure to list them all.
So how do you know which to buy? Here's a rundown of the most frequently advertised DV camcorder features, along with a frank assessment of their value to the quality-obsessed iMovie fan. 1.2.1.1. FireWire connectorFireWire is Apple's term for the tiny, compact connector on the side of most DV camcorders. When you attach a FireWire cable, this jack connects the camera to your FireWire-equipped Mac. Other companies have different names for this connectoryou may see it called IEEE-1394, i.Link, DV In/Out, or DV Terminal. If the camera you're considering doesn't have this feature, don't buy it; you can't use that camera with iMovie (or any other DV software). 1.2.1.2. Analog inputsThis single feature may be important enough to determine your camcorder choice by itself. Analog inputs are connectors on the camcorder (see Figure 1-2) into which you can connect older, pre-DV equipment, such as your VCR, your old 8 mm camcorder, and so on. There's no easier, less expensive method of transferring older footage into your DV camcorderor directly into iMovie. Figure 1-2. Most camcorders offer inputs known as RCA connectors. Better models offer an S-video connector too, for much higher quality. (Most compact models require a special cable with RCA connectors on one end and a miniplug on the camcorder end, like the one shown here. Don't lose this cable! You also need it to play your camcorder footage on TV.)This technique is described in more detail in Chapter 4. For now, note only that the alternative method of transferring pre-DV footage into DV format is to buy a $200 converter boxan unnecessary purchase if your DV camcorder has analog inputs. Tip: Using analog inputs, you can fill a couple of DV cassettes with, say, a movie you've rented. Then flip out the camcorder's LCD screen, plug in your headphones, and enjoy the movie on your cross-country flightin economy class. Smile: The people up front in first class paid $1,000 more for the same privilege. 1.2.1.3. Three chips (CCDs)Professional camcorders offer three individual image sensors, one for each color component of a video picture: red, green, and blue. These camcorders are advertised as having three chips or CCDs ( charge- coupled devices electronic plates, covered with thousands of individual light sensors, that convert light rays into a digital signal). The result is even more spectacular picture quality, resolution, and color rendition than the less-expensive, one-CCD cameras . Unfortunately, most three-chip camcorders are larger and more expensive than one-chip cams (see the photos in Figure 1-7)but they deliver much better color. Not all three-chip models are big and pricey. Panasonic sells one for $500 that's no larger than a standard MiniDV camcorder. Note, however, that it contains three very small CCDs, so the quality improvement is visible primarily in bright, outdoor scenes. 1.2.1.4. LCD viewfinderIn the olden days, you'd set up your shots and monitor your filming by looking through a tiny glass eyepiece. Today, virtually all camcorders offer a small swing-out LCD screen (Figure 1-3). (LCD stands for liquid crystal display , the technology used to produce the image. As you may have noticed, it's the same technology used in laptop screens.) Figure 1-3. Your camcorder's LCD screen can rotate 180 degrees to face front; that's useful when you want to film yourself. Without an LCD screen, you'd have no idea whether or not you were centered in the frame. |
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION What's Digital About DV |
I was a little surprised to find, when I bought my DV camcorder, that it requires tapes, just like my old nondigital one. If it still needs tapes, how can they call it digital ? Your confusion is understandable. After all, digital cameras don't require film, and digital TV recorders (such as the tapeless TiVo and ReplayTV "VCRs") don't use videotape. Today's DV camcorders are really only half digital. They store their signal in digital form as a bunch of computer codes, but still record it on videotape just like the old camcorders. You still have to rewind and fast-forward to find a particular spot in the footage. (Until you transfer the footage to iMovie, that is.) Put another way, today's DV camcorders are a temporary technology, a halfway step toward the ultimate: a camcorder with a little iPod-like hard drive inside. (Already, JVC sells a camcorder that stores an hour of video on a removable 4-gigabyte hard drive.) Until then, stick with old-fashioned tape that stores a modern digital signal. |
On some camcorders, you get an optical image stabilizer instead. This mechanism involves two transparent plates separated by a special optical fluid. As the camera shakes, these plates create a prism effect that keeps handheld shots clearer and steadier than many electronic (digital) stabilizers. The images are clearer because optical stabilizers don't have to crop out part of the picture as a buffer, unlike the stabilizers illustrated in Figure 1-4.
Here's another plan for getting your older footage into iMovie: Buy what Sony calls a Digital8 camcorder. This fascinating hybrid doesn't use the MiniDV videotapes used by all other DV camcorders. Instead, it accepts the less expensive 8 mm or, as Sony recommends, Hi-8 tapes.
Onto these cassettes, Digital8 camcorders record the identical DV signal found on MiniDV camcorders. But they can play back either digital video or traditional, analog video. (When recording digital video, however, the camera runs twice as fastyou still get only one hour of recording per tape, just as on MiniDV tapes.)
This kind of camcorder, in other words, may be a good solution if you have a library of old 8 mm tapes that you'd like to edit in iMovie. Your Mac can't tell which kind of tape the Digital8 camcorder is playing.
On the other hand, full-blown DV camcorders and tapes are no longer much more expensive than their 8 mm predecessors, and Sony's Digital8 camcorder family has already begun to wind down.
Better DV camcorders let you turn off the automatic focus, automatic exposure control, automatic white balance, and even automatic sound level. This feature can be useful in certain situations, as you'll find out in the next chapter. If you've decided to pay extra for this feature, look for a model that lets you focus manually by turning a ring around the lens, which is much easier than using sliders.
When you read the specs for a DV camcorderor read the logos painted on its bodyyou frequently encounter numbers like "12X/300X ZOOM!" The number before the slash tells you how many times the camera can magnify a distant image, much like a telescope . That number measures the optical zoom, which is the actual amount that the lenses themselves can zoom in. Such zooming, of course, is useful when you want to film something that's far away. (As for the number after the slash, see "Digital zoom," on the following page.)
You should know, however, that the more you've zoomed in, the shakier your footage is likely to be, since every microscopic wobble is magnified by, say, 12 times. You also have to be much more careful about focusing. When you're zoomed out all the way, everything is in focusthings near you, and things far away. But when you're zoomed in, very near and very far objects go out of focus. Put into photographic terms, the more you zoom in, the shorter the depth of field (the range of distance from the camera that can be kept in focus simultaneously ).
Finally, remember that magnifying the picture doesn't magnify the sound. If you're relying on the built-in microphone of your camcorder, always get as close as you can to the subject, both for the sound and for the wobble.
Fortunately, the problems exhibited by camcorder batteries of oldsuch as the "memory effect"are a thing of the past. (When you halfway depleted a pre-DV camcorder battery's charge several times in a row, the battery would adopt that half-way-empty point as its new completely empty point, effectively halving its capacity.) Today's lithium-ion battery technology (used by DV camcorders) eliminates that problem.
Sony's InfoLithium batteries even contain circuitry that tells the camera how much juice the battery has remaining. A glance at the viewfinder or a small side-panel readout tells you how many minutes of recording or playback you've got lefta worthy feature.
As you can read in the next chapter, insufficient lighting is one of the leading causes of "amateuritis," a telltale form of poor video quality that lets viewers know that the footage is homemade. In the bestand most expensiveof all possible worlds , you'd get your scene correctly lit before filming, or you'd attach a light to the "shoe" (light connector) on top of the camera. Those few cameras that have such a shoe, or even have a built-in light, give you a distinct advantage in filming accurate colors.
Most DV camcorders come with a number of canned focus/shutter speed/aperture settings for different indoor and outdoor environments: Sports Lesson, Beach and Snow, Twilight, and so on. They're a useful compromise between the all-automatic operation of less expensive models and the all-manual operation of professional cameras.
Some DV camcorders come with a pocket-sized remote control. It serves two purposes. First, its Record and Stop buttons give you a means of recording yourself , with or without other people in the shot. Second, when you're playing back footage with the camcorder connected to your TV or VCR, the remote lets you control the playback without needing to have the camcorder on your lap. You may be surprised at the remote's usefulness .
As you can read in the next chapter, modern camcorders take much of the guesswork out of shooting video. For example, they can focus automatically.
Although few consumers appreciate it, today's camcorders also set their aperture automatically. The aperture is the hole inside the barrel of your camcorder's snout that gets bigger or smaller to admit more or less light, preventing you from under- or overexposing your footage. (Inside the camera is an iris a circle of interlocking, sliding panels that move together to reduce or enlarge the opening, much like the one in a still camera.)
The automatic aperture circuitry works by analyzing the image. If it contains a lot of lightsuch as when you're filming against a snowy backdrop or aiming the camera toward the sunthe iris closes automatically, reducing the opening in the camera lens and thus reducing the amount of light admitted. The result: You avoid flooding the image with blinding white light.
Unfortunately, there may be times when you have no choice but to film somebody, or something, against a bright backdrop. In those cases, as you may have discovered through painful experience, the person you're trying to film shows up extremely dark, almost in silhouette (see Figure 1-5). Now the background is correctly exposed, but the subject winds up underexposed .
A Backlight button, then, is a valuable asset on a camcorder. Its purpose is to tell the camera, "OK, look, it's a bright scene; I can appreciate that. But I'm more interested in the subject that's coming out too dark at the moment. So do me a favor and open that aperture a couple of notches, will you?"
The camera obliges. Your subject no longer winds up too darkin fact, modern camcorders do a great job at making sure the subject turns out just right. But overriding the automatic aperture control undoes the good the automatic iris originally did younow everything around your subject is several shades too bright. Alas, there's no in between. Either your subject or the background can be correctly exposed in very bright settingsbut not both.
All camcorders offer automatic focus. Most work by focusing on the image in the center of your frame as you line up the shot.
That's fine if the subject of your shot is in the center of the frame. But if it's off-center, you have no choice but to turn off the autofocus feature and use the manual-focus ring. (Using the camcorder isn't like using a still camera, where you can point the camera directly at the subject for focusing purposes, and thenbefore taking the shotshift the angle so that the subject is no longer in the center. Camcorders continually refocus, so pointing the camera slightly away from your subject makes you lose the off-center focus you've established.)
Some Canon, Sony, and Sharp camcorders let you point to a specific spot in the frame that you want to serve as the focus point, even if it's not the center of the picture. (This feature is called FlexiZone on the Canon models, or Push Focus on high-end Sony models. On Sony cams with touch-screen LCD panels, it's especially easy to indicate which spot in the frame should get the focus.) If the model you're eyeing has this feature, it's worth having.
Most Sony camcorders offer a mode called NightShot that works like night-vision goggles. In this mode, you can actually film (and see, as you watch the LCD screen) in total darkness . The infrared transmitter on the front of the camcorder measures the heat given off by various objects in its path , letting you capture an eerie, greenish night scene. Rent The Silence of the Lambs for an idea of how creepy night-vision filming can be. Or watch any episode of Survivor .
The transmitter's range is only about 15 feet or so. Still, you may be surprised how often it comes in handy: on campouts, during sleepovers, on nighttime nature walks, and so on.
All DV camcorders offer a snapshot mode in which you can "snap" a still photo. The camcorder freezes one frame of what it's seeing, and records it either on the tape (for, say, a 7-second stretch) or on a memory card.
The still-image quality captured by most camcorders is pretty terrible. The resolution is OK on recent models (some camcorders offer two- or even three-megapixel resolution), but the quality isn't anywhere near what you'd get using a dedicated digital still camera. It turns out that the lenses and circuitry that best serve video are all wrong for stills.
If the camcorder you're considering offers this feature, fine. But it may be redundant for the iMovie owner. iMovie can grab one-megapixel still frames from any captured video, as described in Chapter 9.
This special kind of image sensor is primarily useful for capturing still images. It ensures that the entire image is grabbed, not just one set of alternating, interlaced scan lines (the usual video signal). If you plan to catch still frames from your camcorder, a progressive-scan CCD will spare you some of the jagged lines that may appear. However, if your primary goal is to make movies, this expensive feature is not worth paying for, especially since you can buy a digital still camera, with much greater resolution, for about the same added cost.
Here are some features you'll see in camcorder advertising that you should ignore completely (and definitely not pay extra for).
Some camcorders let you superimpose titles (that is, lettering) on your video as you film. In your case, dear iMovie owner, a title-generating feature is useless. Your Mac can add gorgeous, smooth-edged type, with a selection of sizes, fonts, colors, and even scrolling animations to your finished movies, with far more precision and power than the blocky text available to your camcorder. (Chapter 7 shows you how.)
Most DV camcorders offer a Fade or Fader button. If you press it once before pressing the Record button, you record a smooth, professional-looking fade-in from blackness. But iMovie offers much more graceful and controlled fade-ins and fade-outs. For example, you can specify exactly how many seconds long the fade should last, and you can even fade into a color other than black.
In a few fancy camcorders, you can rerecord only the soundtrack on a piece of tape you've already shot. You could conceivably use this feature to add, for example, an accompanying rock song to a montage of party scenes.
But iMovie offers far more flexibility. For example, iMovie lets you add a piece of music to a scene without deleting the original voices, as your camcorder's audio-dub feature would.
Most DV camcorders offer a selection of six or seven cheesy-looking special effects. They can make your footage look solarized, or digitized, or otherwise processed (see Figure 1-6).
Avoid using these effects; iMovie comes with a number of such special effectsand gives you far greater control over when they start, when they end, and how intensely they affect the video (Chapter 6). And even then, unless you're shooting a documentary about nuclear explosions or bad drug episodes , consider avoiding these effects altogether.
Every camcorder offers the ability to stamp the date and time directly onto the footage. As you've no doubt seen (on America's Funniest Home Videos or America's Scariest Cop Chases ), the result is a blocky, typographically hideous stamp that permanently mars the footage. Few things take the romance out of a wedding video, or are more distracting in spectacular weather footage, than a huge 20 SEP 05 12:34 PM stamped in the corner.
Nor do you have to worry that you'll one day forget when you filmed some event. As it turns out, DV camcorders automatically and invisibly date- and time-stamp all footage. You'll be able to see this information when you connect the camcorder to your Mac; then you can choose whether or not to add it to the finished footage (and with much more control over the timing, location, and typography of the stamp).
You'll find this feature on some Canon and all Sony camcorders. It's a connector that hooks up to special editing consoles.
You, however, have a far superior editing consoleiMovieand a far superior connection methodFireWire. Control-L and Lanc are worthless to you.
Much as computer owners mistakenly jockey for superiority by comparing the megahertz rating of their computers (higher megahertz ratings don't necessarily make faster computers), camcorder makers seem to think that what consumers want most in a camcorder is a powerful digital zoom. Your camcorder's packaging may "boast" zoom ratings of "50X,""100X," or "500X!"
When a camcorder uses its digital zoomthe number after the slash on the camcorder boxit simply enlarges the individual dots that compose its image. Yes, the image gets bigger, but it doesn't get any sharper . As the dots get larger, the image gets chunkier, coarser, and less recognizable, until it ends up looking like the blocky areas you see superimposed over criminals' faces to conceal their identity on Cops . After your digital zoom feature has blown up the picture by 3X, the image falls to pieces. Greater digital zoom is not something worth paying extra for.
Virtually every camcorder manufacturer has adopted the DV format, including Sony, Panasonic, JVC, Sharp, RCA, Hitachi, and Canon. Each company releases a new line of models once or twice a year; the feature list always gets longer, the price always gets lower, and the model numbers always change.
Cameras come in all sizes, shapes , and price ranges (see Figure 1-7). In magazine reviews and Internet discussion groups, Sony and Canon get consistently high marks for high quality. JVC and Sony make the smallest, most pocketable models. Still, each manufacturer offers different exclusive goodies , and each camcorder generation improves on the previous one.
To look over a company's latest camcorders, start by reading about them at the relevant Web site:
Sony . Visit www.sonystyle.com, and then navigate your way to the Digital Camcorder page.
Canon . Go to www.canondv.com to view the various models.
Panasonic . Details are at www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/camcorder.
Sharp . For more on Sharp's ViewCam series, hit www.sharpusa.com/products/TypeLanding/0,1056,70,00.html (or just go to sharpusa.com and navigate your way to the camcorders).
JVC . These camcorders have come a long way since the early days, when JVC's models were incompatible with iMovie. Now they work smoothly, and come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes (including several that record onto hard drives instead of tape). Visit www.jvc.com and navigate to digital camcorders.
Camcorders, as it turns out, are famous for having hopelessly unrealistic list prices. The high-definition Sony HDR-FX1, for example, has an official price tag of $3,700, but you can find it for under $3,000 online.
Once you've narrowed down your interest, then, go straight to a Web site like www.shopper.com to see what the real-world price is. Such Web sites specialize in collecting the prices from mail-order companies all over the world. When you specify the camcorder model you're looking for, you're shown a list of online stores that carry it, complete with prices. (All of the prices in this chapter came from listings on those Web sites.)
As you'll quickly discover, prices for the same camcorder cover an extremely large range. Use the price-comparison Web sites if saving money is your priority.
Of course, you can also find DV camcorders at electronics and appliance superstores (Circuit City, Best Buy, and so on), mail-order catalogs, and even photo stores.