While I'm working on this book, i'm periodically testing whether i still believe the lessons i wrote 7 years ago when i penned the first edition. Back then I had shot about 75 hours of tapes; today i have closer to 300 hours (I actually record less often than when this was novel, but still remember to do it periodically.) So without looking at my logbook, I grabbed a tape from the stack. It turned out to be from about a week of shooting in May 2006.

I dumped the entire tape into my laptop, watching as it went in. I skipped one long useless scene of Jen on the phone, but otherwise had 45 minutes of video in two clips. This represented what I would call 8 scenes (or perhaps "events"). There was a scene of my kids asleep in our bed, early in the morning. There was a scene of them bumming around the house bored, a few different playdates, and shower time in the evening.

In a few hours (using Final Cut Express, which is nice) I edited 6 sketches, ranging from a minute to 4 minutes each. The entire episode runs 9 minutes.

Here are a few of the sketches, each illustrates another real-world situation you'll have when making your videos.

Part 1: Waking up.


This was easy. The kids weren't moving, so a shot from almost anywhere would intercut easily with any other shot. The only real problem was OVERCOVERAGE. I had every conceivable angle on these two. Close, wide. Left. Right. Above...I probably had 7 minute of video for this... It's less than a minute long now, and if I was a great editor, it would be half this.

Part 2: Bored.



Oddly, this was easy for other reasons. I had almost no coverage, and little to cut to to shorten it. Jonah's swinging around covered close and wide was the only repetitive event I could really work with. And since I never got any kind of reverse shot (I'm sitting inside shooting out for the whole time) I luckily have a few wide and close shots but for the most part, it doesn't leave me much room to edit. And thus: it's was easy because i didn't have many options.

Neither of these two would make any kind of "greatest hits" of my sketches. But this is what you typically end up with on your tapes, and cutting it down by a factor of 5 means you might watch it.

You should be able to grab any random tape, drop it into your computer, and cull it down to a shorter video, like these, with occassional creative edits for zest.

This video demonstrates a number of simple concepts:
-Cutting on action
-Framing wide, med and CU
-Coverage
-Titles
-Sound fade in
-Fade in and out

Here's a simple example that predominantly features the work of "cutting on action."
The rule is that your eye is more attentive to how things move than how things look, so when you make an edit, if you cut to maintain the smooth flow of a subject (in this case, usually up and down), the cuts will look good, even if the subject changes (facing forward or facing backward, or even a different person).



NOTE:
- cutting on action
- no production sound, all music (which sets the length)
- generally the camera is steady, even when the subjects are in motion
- notice one cut between a moving subject and their POV (point of view) which is in fact bouncing, but it is a short shot.

I haven't liked the video quality of these videos; so i'm experimenting with larger files and different codex. Here are three. All are resized to QVGA 320x240, all have mono audio. The difference is the video codec selections.

Version A (H264, high quality) = 29MB for 1:39 seconds (17MB/min) <-- this is what i had been using for all the videos here.



Version B (MPEG4, good quality) = 84MB (50MB/min)


Version C (MPEG 4, medium quality) = 52MB (32MB/min)



Version D (MPEG 4, medium quality, not resized from native) = 10MB for 27 seconds (21MB/min)


Version E (MPEG 4, best quality, resized) = 21MB for 27 seconds (42MB/min)

I'm still judging price/performance, but this under-$300 camcorder (I've seen 'em for $220) handles MiniDV (which is great) plus sports a memory stick. It's a nice 1-chip camera, has a modern widescreen LCD, is moderate in size/weight... I think it's the kind of camera that i'll use and will take me gently to 2010 when i buy a HighDef camcorder with a 16GB memory stick for under $500... (or whatever). I've seen the grandpaw of what i'm looking forward to: the HDR-TG1 (releasing this month), a sleek little hottie that will be ready for me a couple versions down the road.)

Tape DEFINITELY has drawbacks (like, it's linear) but tapeless has a number of problems still awaiting economical solutions. I'm sticking with MiniDV for a little longer.

It had its drawbacks to be sure, but shooting on videotape (miniDV, in particular) was pretty logical and straightforward. Put a small $3 tape cassette in your camcorder, shoot an hour of material, pull it out (label it), stick in another. The 60 minute length was a gentle reminder not to shoot indefinitely: since you know full well the likelihood of you watching material is inversely proportional to how much you shoot. 20 hours of a wedding? You'll never see it. 20 minutes? You'll watch it every year. And cry. And the more stuff you shoot of a scene, the harder it gets to edit it. So as the price per GB (of your video) approaches zero, an unusual thing happens. The odds of you cutting it also goes to zero.

So the discipline falls to you. And 8GB memory sticks force a kind of limit. I'm not saying i won't buy 16GB and 32GB as they become available, but i'm fine with 8GB. (Although I balk at 4GB of HD (25 minutes) as just a bit too small.)

But once you've shot the 8GB stick in your camera, what do you do with it? You need to edit it, I suppose, but more importantly, you need to get it out of your camera and off your stick.

Do you dump it onto the 100GB drive in your computer? You could... but it's going to fill up fast if you're shooting much. 100GB is a lot (a LOT) of storage to connect to a computer -- it's a bajillion documents of every kind, it's billions of photographs, but it's only 15 or whatever hours of High Definition video. Suddenly that 100GB is starting to look tight. Crap. Just when hard discs get so huge you think you'd never EVER be able to fill one up (except with archive files and duplicates of duplicates of stuff from old computers you can't bring yourself to go through...) they come along with video. standard definition just-slightly compressed video in the form of MiniDV (requires about 14GB for an hour of material), but high definition video -- with more pixels and more, is more highly compressed) and thus requires 9 GB/hour.

So it's agreed. You can't just dump it to your computer. That is the path if you're going to DO something to it-- edit it, burn it to a (video) DVD with some chapters on it, anything. But what if you just want to put it on a shelf, to determine later if it should be a DVD to watch unedited, or a data file you will import later.

Ahhhh... i must digress; you need to hear this --
just as water can have one of a few "states" -- solid or liquid or gas -- so too does video exist in a number of states -- it can be data or it can be watchable. A Quicktime file is sort of both, but in general you need to think of video as one (data) or the other (video).

When you burn a DVD, there are tons of mathematical algorithms that crunch on your video to put it into the DVD format (compressed using a method called MPEG-2). Once compressed in this format, it is not really data. You can't pull it back into your computer very easily to "DO" something to it -- in particular, to edit it. You could also use the DVD as a data disc -- like a giant CD that holds 4.7GB of data. You don't pop one of these discs in the DVD player hooked to a TV. This goes into your computer.

The video coming out of a tapeless camcorder is still data, and it is as data you probably want to keep it if you intend someday to edit it. If you KNOW you will never want to edit this material, you can immediately crunch it down into a Video DVD, where it will remain for the rest of its natural life. This is one path it might take, but it is all about periodically or frequently editing your videos that I am dedicated, so data storage is what it must be.

So with your video saved as DATA -- how do you log the material? How do you label things and how do you later find what you are looking for when it is time to edit? That's the question I will shortly answer.

After 24 hours of research, talking with Sony, reading everything i could find online, chatting with my old friends in the pro-video industry, and picking the "brains" at Circuit City... this is what I now think.

1) MiniDV is great, and has at least a few more years left. If I wasn't writing a book right now, I'd stick with this format for at least one more year -- for the time when my big TV is highdef, when my DVD player is Blu-Ray HD, and when the prices for good stuff has dropped a bit more. But this is the decision of a guy with lots of MiniDV tapes and who likes to edit.

If I might be forward looking, and giving advice for the next 10 years, I'd play this differently;

2) Until late last night, my preference had been to opt for a big honkin' hard disc in my camcorder, but after some more thought, frankly, they make me nervous. Discs crash. The bigger the disc, the more stuff you lose when they crash, and each month the disc they insert into the camcorder grows... i was looking at 30-40GB HDDs, but i think they grow harder to find, and newer, "better" camcorders have 80GB-100GB HDDs... which is HUGE. The typical HiDef video on these camcorders appears to run around 7.25mins/GB... in otherwords, at top quality, a 100GB camcorder will hold 12 HOURS of video. This is not a feature. It's a curse. I'm serious. You do NOT want to be shooting this much video, you don't have time to watch this, and you don't want to (a) just toss it or (b) save it on an archive hard disk. It's insane and I'll say it now. For those interested in editing, I recommend shooting bits in 20 minute chunks (that can be edited down to a few minutes).

AND THUS: The memory stick camcorders -- while appearing more limiting due to the small size of a 4GB or 8GB "Memory Stick Pro Duo" (which holds either 30-60 mins of HiDef video), is really quite nice and manageable. Over the next year or two, the storage on these things will go up smoothly, and be plenty good - they are robust and solid-state (no moving parts), and removable. And while I haven't had first-hand experience with these (yet), my inclination is to move toward this type of media in my camcorder. (Downside to be revealed as i uncover it).




Since I am a Sony fan (the hardware they make I have found robust and reliable), I am leaning towards a device like the $800 Sony HDR-CX7. Expensive but not outrageous for what it is; high end, but not top of the line, etc.

Still researching, but i thought i'd report how it was going.



FOOTNOTE - Comparable camcorders include:
Samsung SCHMX10 ($500)
Panasonic HD CSD1 ($1100) but it's 3-chip, which is good.
Cannon HF100 ($840)

So, just to take stock of the situation, i went down to my local Circuit City and spent the morning at the camcorder table, listening to the sales pitches from the staff, and messing around with a few dozen featured devices.

Sure enough, there are a bunch of MiniDV camcorders still available, many very good, but they are priced (around $200-$300) to move. Not a great sign, although the salesrep did mention that if I was "into editing" that it might be a good choice. Also priced to dump were the cameras that recorded to various forms of DVD-like disc. I was never into these for a number of reasons - both logical and emotional - and was steered by the salesrep and the architecture of the display itself to explore the Hard Disc recording camcorders.

NOTE: One must be exceptionally careful with these "HD"devices, for the "HD" stamped on the outside is not the High Definition "HD" you might be looking for. They use "Full HD" to refer to high definition video (usually accompanied by a resolution measurement); and "HDD" to refer to "Hard Disc Device" recording. And there are a number of high-quality HD HDD camcorders - the top of the line in fact are of this variety.

If I was going to trade up I would go from my 3-Chip workhorse, the Sony TRV-900 (circa 1998) (measurably more attractive images than from the one-chip varieties more common); and move to a 30-80GB hard disc (I think i'd rather smaller, but that's my first impression) 3-Chip High Definition camera, probably from Sony. These range in the $1000-$1200 range, a little LESS than what I got my TRV for a decade ago. I had come to Circuit City thinking that even a lousy HD camera is going to be better quality than my Sony, so trade size and cost for resolution, and get a mid-range high def -- spending $500-$800. It's still a lot, but not for a great camera. I just spent in that range for an excellent Digital SLR (mine is from Olympus, but it's an old brand attraction from my youth), and that's just an SLR. This is a high def camcorder.

They seem to be touting how much video can be recorded on these camcorders. At standard def a 40GB camcorder can hold something like 10-30 hours, but at High Def it's in the range of 5-10 hours.

Still: 10 hours is an organizational nightmare. You don't want 10 hours in a load, do you??? Breath. Think. Is this antiquated values washing their inertial old school bodies on a new value proposition? Or is it learned wisdom from years of experience? Think. Think.

I have a day or so to figure out (a) what kind of camcorder would I want for myself. I cannot advise if i'm not in the game for real. And what other kind of camcorder should I check out seriously, that might not be what i'd naturally choose for myself but represents a fairly typical purchase of consumers interested in video, but not all that confident in whether they liked the hobby or not... Would they get an $800 Sony or would they get a $450 Panasonic? Would you pay for High Def?

This is what I'm thinking about today.

I got an email today that says the contract is on its way to me. On a lark, I checked amazon, and sure enough, the book has already got a page (well... a placeholder...) Wow.

As i've been editing this week, and thinking about consumer video, i've been stunned to realize that the heyday of consumer editing that got me jazzed (beginning around 1998) is just about gone! It was the remarkable combination of MiniDV tape (virtually pro quality video), Firewire (plug the camera into the computer and the thing works like a charm, it's just another device with a high bandwidth, uncompressed signal), and the first versions of Final Cut Pro (super powerful, very simple).

But now 10 years later, the era of videotape is gone. MiniDV is still out there (and there are still millions of camcorders in use) but new camcorders record to hard disks or flash drives or, sometimes, direct to DVDs... which means your video isn't always "instantly" archived when you shoot, you have to do something to it. Firewire is gone from most consumer cameras, so connectivity is a bit wonky, and Final Cut Pro has become SO good you can't really use it as a consumer, and the consumer tools (like iMovie) aren't really much about editing...

This isn't to say consumer video is dead. On the contrary - the recording of video is almost ubiquitous - on every phone and camera in the land, even the cheapest of computers can manage hours of video and the required processing... DVDs are nonlinear and in spite of the compression issues, are probably better for consumers than MiniDV (in some respects), and finally, the distribution and sharing potential for video is massive (think YouTube), something hard to imagine a decade ago... and thus, the need for the second edition is ripe. Still, an era is gone and it's going to take a fair amount of experimentation to figure out how to use all this stuff to make fun, simple, home videos.

That's what I get to do these weeks, if you're wondering what i'm up to. And if you see me with a camera, just ignore me. It's better if you do.

Well, i loaded FCE today and pulled in the same 6 minutes of video from China, and after about 45 minutes, here is the cut done with slightly more sophisticated software.



What differences do you see?