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.
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.