Video cameras

General
1

I’m trying to make a kind of a silly trials short video thing at the
moment - to be called one wheel short (which is also the proposed name for
the few unicycleists here in soton - assumeing no one else has used this
before of course) - it’ll hopefully include some grinds, gaps, drops, fire
breathing and juggling and hopping up the coolest obstical ever - a
waterfall fountain here at the uni. The only trouble is I need a new
camera, so… Has anyone got a suggestion for a good camera i can link up
to my lovely new mac that won’t break the bank?

Thanks Joe

2

> Has anyone got a suggestion for a good camera i can link up to my lovely
> new mac that won’t break the bank?

Just a general suggestion you may already know:

Even though it costs a little more, don’t mess around with anything other
than DV. You can ‘fire wire’ it in and out of your Mac, and the picture
quality is easily worth the extra expense. The Sony camera my wife and I
brought to China in 2000 was an amazing piece of hardware, but was one of
the more expensive ones. Geoff Faraghan had the Sony PC-5, which I
thought was awesome. Same optics as our camera, but in a package that
fits in a bum bag.

Good luck, John Foss, the Uni-Cyclone jfoss@unicycling.com
www.unicycling.com

“455 newsgroup messages in a year is only 1.24 per day…” - John Foss,
trying to explain to his wife

3

Joe,

To echo what John said, I highly recommend you purchase a DV camera with FireWire (IEEE 1384)capability. Nothing beats FireWire connectivity.

I have a Canon Elura (original model - no longer available) that is a single CCD camera. I bought the Canon rather than the Sony that John and his wife own because it fit my hand like a glove. I actually found the Sony (and find some of the new Canaon models) too small! Of couse, I spent almost 20 years carying video cameras on my shoulder that were about 50 pounds (not counting the recorder and extera batteries).

My Elura can produce great quality video, but it gets blown away by any of the three CCD models, such as the Canon GL1 (low end - about $1500) or XL15 (high end (don’t ask $!) - used to shoot some of the “reality” stuff you watch on broadcast TV).

Friends of mine just got a GL1 to produce a series of training videos on DVD. They also got a low end digital editing system (under $2K), two inexpensive lapel mics, a small digital audio mixer and a decent fluid head tripod. As always, how much you get depends on how much you have to spend and your ultimate goal.

Tom Daniels

4

I’ve also had the Sony PC-5 for the last 18 months and it is fantastic. I
would only consider mini-DV cameras - just look for a good deal on one.
You don’t need the latest and greatest - it might be possible to get old
ones like the PC-5 for quite a reasonable price now. It was $1200 when I
got it (list $1700).

—Nathan, posting at an average of 0.5 times per day last year

“John Foss” <john_foss@asinet.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1010599289.16632.rsu@unicycling.org…
> > Has anyone got a suggestion for a good camera i can link up to my
> > lovely new mac that won’t break the bank?
>
> Just a general suggestion you may already know:
>
> Even though it costs a little more, don’t mess around with anything
> other than DV. You can ‘fire wire’ it in and out of your Mac, and the
> picture quality is easily worth the extra expense. The Sony camera my
> wife and I brought to China in 2000 was an amazing piece of hardware,
> but was one of the more expensive ones. Geoff Faraghan had the Sony
> PC-5, which I thought was awesome. Same optics as our camera, but in a
> package that fits in a
bum
> bag.
>
> Good luck, John Foss, the Uni-Cyclone jfoss@unicycling.com
> www.unicycling.com
>
>
> “455 newsgroup messages in a year is only 1.24 per day…” - John Foss,
> trying to explain to his wife

5

Actually, just to clarify one of the finer points, there is DV
(professional, you probably won’t find this at best buy) and there’s mini-
dv. If someone says DV, chances are, they mean mini-dv, but there is just
plain DV. Honestly, I don’t know the techincal details.

Sony also makes a digital-8 line of cameras. Like mini-dv, these are fully
digital, and can connect to a computer via firewire. I believe (not
certain) the sony line can use standard super-8 tapes… they just give
you less recording time in digital mode.

Also, do consider your computer. You’ll want lots of hard drive space, and
a fast hard drive and computer to match. I’ve got a 333 pentium II – no
chance that thing could keep up. I borrowed my foommates 900 pentium 3
with a 7400 (er, is it 74 or 72, I forget) rpm hard drive. That chuggled a
little, but managed just fine. As for the file sizes, the longest I’ve
ever captured was 20 mins, and if memory serves, it was over 8 gigs in
size. Of course, you can convert to whatever smaller file type you want
to, but not until after you’ve captured the full quality stream to your
hard drive.

I got a canon zr-10 mini-dv (this model may have issues with eating tapes
so I won’t recommend you get it) for about $600 open box. Quality of the
thing is great (though I haven’t compared it to other mini-dv), just about
everything you see on my web site (lutkus.com) was filmed with it.

jeff lutkus

>> Has anyone got a suggestion for a good camera i can link up to my
>> lovely new mac that won’t break the bank?
>
> Just a general suggestion you may already know:
>
> Even though it costs a little more, don’t mess around with anything
> other than DV. You can ‘fire wire’ it in and out of your Mac, and the
> picture quality is easily worth the extra expense. The Sony camera my
> wife and I brought to China in 2000 was an amazing piece of hardware,
> but was one of the more expensive ones. Geoff Faraghan had the Sony
> PC-5, which I thought was awesome. Same optics as our camera, but in a
> package that fits in a bum bag.
>
> Good luck, John Foss, the Uni-Cyclone jfoss@unicycling.com
> www.unicycling.com
>
>
> “455 newsgroup messages in a year is only 1.24 per day…” - John Foss,
> trying to explain to his wife
>
_________________________________________________________________________-
__
> rec.sport.unicycling mailing list -
> www.unicycling.org/mailman/listinfo/rsu

Sent via the Unicyclist Community - http://Unicyclist.com

6

“Jeff Lutkus” <lutkus@unicyclist.com> wrote in message
news:<mailman.1010621169.19751.rsu@unicycling.org>… <snip>
> Also, do consider your computer. You’ll want lots of hard drive space,
> and a fast hard drive and computer to match. I’ve got a 333 pentium II
> – no chance that thing could keep up. I borrowed my foommates 900
> pentium 3 with a 7400 (er, is it 74 or 72, I forget) rpm hard drive.
> That chuggled a little, but managed just fine.
<snip>

If you’re not doing any fancy transitions between scenes (e.g. fades,
dissolves etc.) then processor speed isn’t too important. What is
important is disk data throughput rate. I think mini-DV needs about
4-5MB/s, there’s a DOS utility called disksped (I think) that will let
you check the throughput on your machine. So what you need is a big,
fast disk, but that should not be a problem in most modern machines. You
don’t need a fancy SCSI disk system, most modern ATA disks will easily
be good enough.

Where processor speed becomes important is if you are doing more than just
plain chopping the original up, repositioning scenes and copying back to
tape or disk. If you use scene transitions or resize/reformat from the
original source, then the computer has to render a new image for every
frame. This takes a lot of computing cycles, so the faster the better. I
have done basic editing on a 150MHz PC before, it was a case of leaving
the machine on overnight for it to d its job (only a 2 minute video), but
it did do the job. For more realistic performance (or for less patient
people) then a 500MHz machine would be the minimum I would work with.

One thing to bear in mind about the camera. Many (most?) mini-DV cameras
do not have an analogue video input (via RCA connector), only output. If
you get one with analog in then you will be able to use one of those
very small “bullet” cameras that you can tape to your
helmet/frame/whatever to get interesting “up close” views with less risk
of totally trashing your camera.

Have fun! Graeme

<Don’t reply via email, the above address is defunct

7

“Jeff Lutkus” <lutkus@unicyclist.com> wrote in message
news:<mailman.1010621169.19751.rsu@unicycling.org>… <snip>
> Also, do consider your computer. You’ll want lots of hard drive space,
> and a fast hard drive and computer to match. I’ve got a 333 pentium II
> – no chance that thing could keep up. I borrowed my foommates 900
> pentium 3 with a 7400 (er, is it 74 or 72, I forget) rpm hard drive.
> That chuggled a little, but managed just fine.
<snip>

If you’re not doing any fancy transitions between scenes (e.g. fades,
dissolves etc.) then processor speed isn’t too important. What is
important is disk data throughput rate. I think mini-DV needs about
4-5MB/s, there’s a DOS utility called disksped (I think) that will let
you check the throughput on your machine. So what you need is a big,
fast disk, but that should not be a problem in most modern machines. You
don’t need a fancy SCSI disk system, most modern ATA disks will easily
be good enough.

Where processor speed becomes important is if you are doing more than just
plain chopping the original up, repositioning scenes and copying back to
tape or disk. If you use scene transitions or resize/reformat from the
original source, then the computer has to render a new image for every
frame. This takes a lot of computing cycles, so the faster the better. I
have done basic editing on a 150MHz PC before, it was a case of leaving
the machine on overnight for it to d its job (only a 2 minute video), but
it did do the job. For more realistic performance (or for less patient
people) then a 500MHz machine would be the minimum I would work with.

One thing to bear in mind about the camera. Many (most?) mini-DV cameras
do not have an analogue video input (via RCA connector), only output. If
you get one with analog in then you will be able to use one of those
very small “bullet” cameras that you can tape to your
helmet/frame/whatever to get interesting “up close” views with less risk
of totally trashing your camera.

Have fun! Graeme

<Don’t reply via email, the above address is defunct