Of Video Tape and Hard Drives and Time Code

Truth be told, I don’t closely follow the latest developments in camera and computer hardware. Sure I am aware of how the sand is shifting under our feet… away from tape-based production and over to file-based acquisition. But I don’t really have the time or interest to delve into the nuanced differences between all the different camera models. I think for most of us a camera is just a tool for storytelling. And don’t ask me if it is best to buy a flash, hard-drive or DVD camera. Each has benefits and liabilities, and you are currently running a 2-in-3 risk of buying a handsome doorstop instead of a camera. It will be well over a year before one of these particular formats emerges victorious as the de-facto home movie standard.

I work a lot with file based media in my other life as a producer and editor. Probably 50% of the content I work with comes from a hard drive instead of tape. And if the economy had not landed so decidedly in the dumper, I have a feeling Christmas sales of file based HD cameras would have been epic. The manufacturers certainly thought so. It is difficult to find a camera for sale that uses tape… DV or HDV. You may find one or two of them tucked away on the end or the back of the shelf, out of direct view.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the change is bad. I really like what Pure Digital Technologies is doing with the Flip MinoHD (especially at the price point), and Canon’s HG30, HF100, and Sony’s HDR-SR11 all call out to me when I walk through the store. I love window shopping, picking up a camera to see how it feels in my hand, checking the balance, the weight, access to features. I just don’t know if I feel compelled to buy one.

Media Notes Episode 9 | Timecode Breaks

With changes in our spending habits because of the worsening economy comes a change in the adoption curve for these new cameras. Logic says it will flatten out with early adopters taking longer to move to an early majority and critical mass. In other words, we will be in this state of technical flux longer than most manufacturers anticipated. We won’t be buying many new cameras and we will hold on to our old ones longer.

This brings me (in a long and indirect way) to the notion that most of us are still using tape. And we are likely to use tape for some time to come. The cameras we have purchased in the past few years still make great movies. Not to mention the hours of legacy content we have of our families, sitting in a cardboard box on a shelf in the hall closet (the tapes are in the box in the hall, not our families. Although with four kids there are times…).

It is best then to learn the most efficient ways to manage your footage. Time code is a great tool to catalog, organize and capture your footage for editing. And you should shoot to edit. Even if it is just to chop out the wiggly bits of camera movement when you start and stop your camera. Editing takes your movies from unwatchable to enjoyable. Especially for others.

When you are shooting with tape, and you have a partially or previously recorded tape, when you put it into the camera and start recording it will pick up where the numbers left off. That’s a good thing. But this only happens if the tape is at a point where the camera can read where you left off.

You need to be careful if you rewind the tape to look at your footage, or take it out of the camera. When you are done reviewing you’ll cue the tape up to where you left off. You need to do this just right and here is why. When you’re trying to find where you left off you may roll past the end of your footage and then you are in snow (the screen will look blue). If you start recoding here, the timecode will not pick up where you left off, it will reset to zero. That’s because the camera thinks you have started a new tape. 

You don’t want a tape that starts at zero over and over again.

You see your computer uses these numbers as a guide when you transfer your footage for editing. If you have multiple instances of the same number, your camera and computer probably won’t know where to find your shots. It can’t tell which time code you intended to use.

In this episode of Media notes I talk about a few ways you can avoid the headaches that come with broken timecode. And here is the enticing part, I show you my shoes. No really. And there is a reason why.

 

Technorati Tags: how-to,spaces,movie maker,home movies,video,camera,Flip MinoHD,HG10,HF100,HDR-SR11,timecode,video tape,tape

Little Video Books

Somehow I got tied to the work of Michael Rubin. I never intended for this to be the case. I am pretty sure he doesn’t know about it.

In graduate school a few years ago I was tasked with writing a book review about Rubin’s 500 page chronology of filmmaker George Lucas’ idea farm and the pixel pushing ranch hands who work at Skywalker Ranch. “Droidmaker“ is the inside story of George Lucas, his intensely private company, and their work to revolutionize filmmaking.

Fast-forward to my current efforts to stay abreast of content written specifically for demystifying personal filmmaking. I have plenty of academic textbooks that my students use in the classes I teach at University of Washington. Most of the books are really quite dreadful. They resonate with all the readability of a phonebook or military field manual. There are precious few authors that keep it simple.

Over the years I have passed countless copies of Tom Schroeppel’s “The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video” on to budding filmmakers. It was first published a quarter century ago, but the practical sensibilities found between the brown paper covers are timeless. You can still find it on line for about $15, and if you want a quick jump start into  understanding how to shoot I can’t think of a better place to start.

Which brings me to Michael Rubin. Lo and behold he has published a little book about home video called, appropriately enough, “The Little Digital Video Book.” On the whole, Rubin has done a very good job here. I disagree with his take on incorporating sound bites into personal videos (he says no and I think they are critical to keeping your work timeless), but his explanations about framing, sequencing and editing are much better than most any other starter book I have found. If you are looking for a little manual you can tuck into a camera bag or use to fiddle away a few minutes I recommend his book. Rubin has done a good job and I guarantee that after starting this book your shooting will immediately improve. I can’t say that with most of the books I have seen.

 

 

Technorati Tags: how-to,spaces,movie maker,home movies,video,camera,Michael Rubin,Rubin,Lucas,skywalker,droidmaker,bare bones camera,little digital video book,schroeppel,video tape,tape

Why do we make home movies?

Hmm, two posts referencing New York Times columnist David Pogue in a week. But a recent article really cut me to the quick. 

Pogue asks the question, “Why do I film every vacation, every school year highlight, every birthday party?” The question comes in response to a reader who simply can’t stand home movies. In a Pogue column he asked David the question, “What makes you think you’ll have any grandchildren with the time and inclination to sit through more than a few minutes of your home videos?” Fair enough.

As a parent and professional who has devoted 30 years to video storytelling and the last 13 to capturing the adventure of being a parent, I have to admit that I feel compelled to document the family. I am not sure why. OK, that is not entirely true. I think I know why.  Pogue postulates that we do it for five reasons. For our older selves, for our descendants, for pleasure, for historians and for posterity. I completely agree with his list, even if it feels rather noble and lofty. But I think I frame this issue with a perspective on where do we go forward, as opposed to what do we do with all the video flotsam washing up under our beds and in our closets?

As it has been often noted, life is lived in the moments between memorable events. Too many of the videos we shoot are of birthdays, Christmas, Hanukah or Labor Day barbeques. My favorite moments on tape are not of these milestones, but of the family dinner, the kids splashing in the inflatable pool, the living room forts or the backyard baseball games. These are the parts of a life well lived that are too often forgotten. When I see my kids from 10 years ago I remember fondly what a blessing and a blast it was to parent these little guys.

Pogue’s reader comes down pretty hard on people who create home movies. He writes, “The movies an uncle shot of me and my siblings a few decades ago were projected for about 30 minutes a decade ago, and have not been looked at again by anybody… I just question whether the people amassing them [home movies] at great length have much idea of what they require of the people in them, or who inherit them.” To be blunt, I am guessing this guy does not form the sort of connections to the past that many of us treasure. I would be all over watching film of me with my siblings. If for no other reason than to mock my hair and ridicule our fashion choices. 

 

Flying Fish from drewke on Vimeo.

I shoot to edit. I can’t imagine forcing someone to sit through most of the crap I capture. There is great satisfaction distilling the emotions of a moment into a brief (and I emphasize the word brief) little movie. We shoot every day events, heck, we even shoot vacations. Sure the audience is limited to my wife, four kids, and perhaps a relative or two. But creating these movies creates a new shared experience. 

The larger problem is the too few tools we currently have to easily share video the way we do digital photos. This is changing with the advent of file based cameras, easier software, and even the potential of using cloud computing to edit and distribute your movie. But for now, shooting, editing and distributing your home movie is unnecessarily cumbersome. For me, even if I do it all on the web, I am guessing my audience will be no larger than 4 kids, a spouse and a grandmother. The only difference between now and 30 years ago is now we’ll be able to watch on our own terms, not trapped in a darkened living room wondering when the awful home movie will be done.

This example may shed a little insight into the way my family and I shoot and revisit our vacations. On our last trip to Hong Kong each of the kids chose two topics to report on during the holiday. This one is on the Star Ferry, and my daughter Kyra did one on shopping and Kat did one on history. Figuring out how to share our family’s content with family has led me to look at social networking solutions. I am guessing in the future how we share what we create will land somewhere between blogging, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo and feed aggregators. Oh wait, that sounds an awful lot like WindowsLive.

 

Technorati Tags: home movies,drew kelller,david pogue,new york times,video,media flow

Flip over HD

Just when you thought HD cameras couldn’t get any smaller, Pure Digital, maker of the mega-popular Flip camcorders, is rolling out the the MinoHD. This is essentially the Flip Mino shooting 720p HD video.  The Wall Street Journal’s Katie Boehret tested this insanely small profile camera and had generally high praise for this potential game-changer in the consumer HD camera market.  You can see some of her test footage below.

This is not a camera that can be easily dismissed. The New York Times reported that the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley over the past few years was not Facebook, VMWare, or all-mighty Google. According to Deloitte, the professional services firm, it was none other than  Pure Digital Technologies, maker of, you guessed it, the Flip video camera.

The appeal of the Flip has never been incredible optics or a robust feature set… no it is all about simplicity. When my daughter started shooting with flash-based cameras (she was I marveled at the novelty. The rock-bottom price of these cameras put them in the range of an impulse buy at the electronics store. One of the potential challenges that Pure Digital may face is the price for this new camera. It jumps to $230 and puts it out of impulse range and more directly in competition with consumer cameras that have such novel options as an optical zoom, image stabilization and external mic jack.

But this is all about simplicity and you can be certain this camera is simple to operate.

Its internal 4GB of will hold up to an hour of video. I am not personally a big fan of the 720p format. It is a frame size that straddles the line between standard definition (480i) and HD (1080i). Both Sony and Cannon have adopted 1080 as the HD format for their cameras, while JVC and Panasonic have chosen 720. (Can you say VHS v. Betamax?)

 

Most new HD Televisions will handle either format quite nicely. The choice to work in 720 for the Flip Mino is logical. 1080 files are significantly larger and to get smooth recordings would require the ability to write a lot a data very quickly to the memory chip. Not only are you pushing fewer pixels around with the smaller 720 format, you are also pushing fewer 1’s and 0’s. You can record and retrieve files faster. Mixing your Mino footage with content from your Canon or Sony HD camera could be problematic as you will be mixing formats and most current edit packages don’t handle this problem very smoothly.

The new camera also will utilize new FlipShare software. This on-board software platform allows a user to plug the camcorder’s flip-out USB arm into any computer for easy drag-and-drop video organizing, editing and sharing. This has not always been true with past iterations of the software. Particularly when wrestling with a sometimes balky DivX codec.

FlipShare’s use of drag-and-drop video organizing resembles the way that Apple iTunes songs can be dragged into playlists. Users can manage their files, rename and copy through the intuitive interface. They have made following the usual paths of distribution quite easy (save to the computer, play full screen, share via e-mail, upload to YouTube, AOL or MySpace, or create a movie.) On the Mac side, it’s fully compatible with Apple’s video applications, including iMovie and iDVD.

While not quite perfect, and I usually hate to buy the first generation of any technology, I have a feeling I know which camera will be under the tree this Christmas.

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,HD,home video,flip,flip minohd,mino,Pure Digital Technologies,flipshare

Say goodbye to Firewire?

With the rollout of the new MacBook comes the inevitable news that Firewire is dying. The machine is loaded with oodles of new features and many old favorites wrapped in a signature aluminum case. The drag coefficient for this new case must be significantly lower than the old plastic one, and that will be quite handy if I ever leave it on the roof of my car.

The development of this new machine does not herald any new or startling development in the Mac ecosystem, save one. There is no firewire port on the MacBook. And there is no way to add one. You can swap hard drives like you currently swap external drives, and the new track pad reflects the usability of the iPhone and Touch.

But losing the firewire port is a signal that consumers are not going to transfer their video tapes to their machines. No editing, no DVD, no looking back at your old movies when you make that video designed to embarrass your daughter on Prom night. (“Dad! You will NOT show me naked in the tub when I was 18 months old! You will NOT show me tap dancing at the talent show!”)

It is a sure sign that consumers are no longer buying tape-based cameras. Any trip to Circuit City will tell you that. Just try and find a tape-based camera on display. There might be one HDV… two DV. The rest are flash-based or hard drive.

That is fine going forward, but what about our legacy content? What do we do with that? And when the hard drive on our new camera gets full what do we do with the media? I hate tracking and searching file-based content. It is the definition of needle in the haystack. More likely, what happens when that hard drive fails?

I am still struggling with a closet full of legacy content; shelves full of magnetic tape slowly trying to reach a state of stasis. I have Hi8, DV, DVCam, Betamax, VHS, Beta, BetaCam, DigiBeta, DVCPro, D5 and HDCam waiting to get called back into action.

Apple’s decision just reaffirms what I have know all along. Those formats are not coming back into action. In 10 years you will have a very hard time finding a deck that will even play these formats. My kid’s birthdays, my family’s holidays, the business trips and vacations will all be inaccessible.

Truth be told, if you don’t edit your content right after you shoot it, odds are you will never get around to it. The industry knows most of this footage gets shot, viewed once and then forgotten.

Perhaps I need to send a thank-you to Steve Jobs for the wake-up call. This new computer tells me I had better start thinking about how I am going to get my stacks of tape transferred to something I can use. And I need to kiss my firewire dependence goodbye.

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,Apple,video,filmmaking,firewire,Macbook,DV,tape

Counters, Numbers and Timecode

The first few blog posts here on Media Flow have been rather technical in nature. I am not much of a gear-head, but I find that most often it is the technical details that get in the way of having a great experience shooting and producing personal videos. My hope is if I create a foundation by first discussing technical topics I can then move on to what I consider the fun stuff… insights on narrative and aesthetic techniques for compelling storytelling. I think most folks would much rather learn about how to compose a good shot, or sequence a scene or edit a montage than listen to me drone on about how to load a tape.

With that in mind I present the next episode of Media Notes… Timecode.

Timecode Basics

I know. As far as topics go this one is nay too sexy. But I believe you will spend more time wrestling with timecode issues as you produce your personal movies than you will with any other technical problem. At some time most of you will have challenges that range from duplicate code on your tape; to code that shifts up and down from poor shooting procedures; to problems getting your computer to track and digitize your footage. There is no reason for this wasted time and countless frustrating minutes. A little “timecode hygiene” will keep you concentrating on the fun stuff… the creative stuff.

Timecode is an exceptionally useful and important number. Timecode creates the “where” information on a tape. Each frame has a unique number (unique if you set things up correctly) and that number becomes an address for finding your content. I sometimes think of timecode as a mile marker on the freeway. If I tell you to meet me at milepost 165 southbound Interstate 35 in Iowa, we could both find it. I have nary a clue what is there, but this is a unique address and I can find that point, and you can too.

No matter if you are using tape or file-based media, timecode will be a part of your production process. It certainly will help if you spend a few moments becoming familiar with the how and why of using timecode. Grounding yourself with a few fundamentals is always a good idea.

Technorati Tags: how-to,spaces,movie maker,home movies,video,camera,drew keller

It was shot with a still camera…

The line between still and video cameras continues to blur. True, that’s a painful pun, but there is no denying this trend is most evident in top-of-the-line still cameras. If we could look at the names on the waiting list for the Canon 5D Mark II professional S.L.R. I would wager most of them would belong to filmmakers, not still photographers.

This is because the high definition footage from the Canon is mind blowing. It is full motion, 30 frame-per-second, 1080p footage captured on an image sensor the size of a 35mm negative, instead of the video camera’s fingernail sized CCD. Not only is the capture system vastly superior with the S.L.R., but the glass in the lens means the image in the $2,700 camera rivals that of a $100,000 HD camera used for features. Using Canon’s interchangeable lenses means the filmmaker is no longer limited to a zoom lens full of compromises permanently mounted to the camera. You now have a prime lens system with out Redrock. And you have a digital cinema solution without the hype of Red and their proprietary file format hassles.  You have a filmmakers Nirvana. You also have a very long waiting list.

There have even been a few rumors of late that Red pulled their plans to release Scarlet because the 5DM2 chopped the legs out from under it. Honestly, that would not surprise me.

Sure there are compromises. There is no audio to speak of so you are back to double system sound. But heck, I could figure that out using an iPhone or a DVcam.

The Web was buzzing a couple of weeks ago when photographer Vincent LaForet spent a weekend making a short, wordless movie using an early Canon 5D Mark II. He hired a couple of models, grabbed a crew, rented a helicopter, pulled together $5,000, and made an absolutely astonishing-looking piece of video. It was hard to find the thing online—Vincent didn’t want to host it on his own site because of the massive bandwidth required to serve it. (Here’s his writeup, and here’s the “making of” video.)

Finally, David Pogue of the New York Times writes that, “the original video has finally found a place online, and you should have a look.” I could not agree more, you should have a look. And as Pogue writes,  “Just keep telling yourself: ‘It was shot with a still camera. It was shot with a still camera….’”

LaForet | Visuals (in HD)

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,Canon 5D Mark II,video,filmmaking,still camera,HD,1080p,LaForet

Camera Tour Part 2

Media Notes Episode 7 – Camera Tour

The great thing about the creative process is there are no rules. Oh sure, we can talk about the rule of thirds, or don’t cut two wide shots together, or electricity and water are a poor mix. But much of the process of storytelling is driven by your aesthetic sensibilities, not rules. If we were to tell a story about a common experience, each would tell it differently, focusing on details and elements that are important to the teller. To me, that is the cool part of creating videos. What is important to the teller? What do they bring to the story that sheds insight into their view of the world?

My daughter once made a video about her Furby attacking a piece of lawn art. It was a fascinating look at the way my then 8-year-old daughter saw the world. She shot it all on a little flash-based camera, strung the clips together in MovieMaker and was done. I loved seeing what she felt was important to the story and the fluidity of the plot. OK, it was so fluid there was no plot.

Where is this leading? I want to reiterate that much of what I talk about comes from 30 years of experience making TV. My point of view is shaped by a career of breaking stuff. Cameras, software, computers, tripods, more lights than I can count… I learned early that it is best to be careful, but not to be intimidated by the tools or the process. I also learned from literally hundreds of professionals who shared their opinions with me about the best way to make TV. As we continue the camera tour with a look at video tape you will see that I have opinions about the best way to accomplish a task. But they are only opinions, not gospel. The ideas and observations work for me, and have worked for the literally hundreds of students I have taught to be filmmakers. If you disagree, that is totally cool.

And please, don’t send me your lens cap. I have enough already.

 

Technorati Tags: how-to,spaces,movie maker,home movies,video,camera,drew keller

Camera Tour Part 1

Episode 6 – Camera Tour Part 1 

I really try and avoid jargon. Too often I slip into the trap and hear myself sounding self-important as I toss acronyms and slang into conversation. For instance, why say LCD screen when screen will do just fine? Calling it liquid crystal or plasma isn’t going to directly affect my shooting. And numbers get displayed on a screen… for me the screen is not a display. What is the point here? Well in this episode I am starting a jargon-free tour of the common video camera.

Many of you are very familiar with your camera, so the material in today’s episode may seem obvious. For example, if you have been shooting for a while you certainly know where to find the on/off switch. But there is a huge population of folks out there that are really intimidated by all the knobs, buttons and glass on a camera. I watch my wife try and shoot with anything beyond our Flip and her anxiety ratchets up appreciatively. This video blog episode, and the next, are not really geared for the power user, although I hope everyone finds something new. They are geared for those who leave their camera in the closet or under the bed, unused and unloved. The users who have hours of unseen footage in a box. Those of you who can’t figure out why your footage is not what you expected.

My goal here is to create an invitation to those who are intimidated by the technology, the complication and the impenetrable mystique of creating personal media. My hope is to open the door to those who begin a task like editing a home movie and quit because they don’t know where to start. So in the spirit of beginning at the beginning, we start with where to find the power switch.

 

Technorati Tags: how-to,spaces,movie maker,home movies,video,camera

Interviews

The process of teaching some of the finer points of personal video production can be somewhat chaotic. Where do you begin? What is helpful to one may be obvious or uninspiring to another. An important part of the task over the next few months is to build a body of content that will present a foundation in the basics of digital video. It is a lot of ground to cover.

Episode 5 – Interviews

I expect much of this content will be about how you can use your camera to tell your story. The choices you have available may seem a subtle at first but they can dramatically affect your video.

Let’s take camera height. All too often we see footage of a child taken from the adult’s point of view. We watch home movies where we see are the tops of a lot of little heads and upturned faces. When I shoot kids, or anyone for that matter, I work to set the height of the camera to be level with the eyes of the subject. That means when I am photographing someone less than six feet tall (my height) I take the camera off my shoulder and drop it to the right height. This can make a huge difference. Take a look at the power of the little girl describing peacocks in this episode’s video. She talks directly into the camera, she is full of energy, and we have a glimpse into her world. I certainly am not the first to point out that the world of a four-year-old can have the same power and insight as that of a fifty-four-year-old. Thinking about your camera position will help you to show the moment with integrity.

This episode is not about camera angles, oddly enough. It is about how you can tell a story. When we shoot home movies we usually just spray the camera around the room. Hosing down the event as if the place was on fire. We see Uncle Ed in the corner, there is Aunt Ethel at the table with her Niece, and look, there is the toddler unwrapping a gift. It is a string of random moments with little connective narrative. A great way to create home movies you will treasure for a lifetime is to interview the people in your video. Have them tell you what they are doing, how they feel, what is important about the day or the event, who they are, why they are there… I think you get the idea. This is your chance to play journalist and ask them who, what, when, where, why and how. It is not an inquisition, but their answers can give perspective to otherwise confusing footage. Besides, you will have the added benefit of using your interviews as the narrative spine of your video.