Considering video/still convergence and Sony’s NEX-VG10 interchangeable lens camcorder

Back in May I wrote about the vexing mix of features in Sony’s new NEX interchangeable lens digital cameras. While visiting a big Chicagoland electronics megastore I finally got my hands on the NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras and came away liking them more than I expected. Though I only got to play with them for a few minutes I didn’t find the user interface to be as frustrating as I predicted. I rarely shoot in full manual mode, generally preferring aperture- or shutter-priority. So changing aperture or shutter using the back control dial was fairly intuitive and easy.

I was truly blown away by the form-factor. These are tiny cameras! Without the lens they’re the size of a typical compact point-and-shoot. With the lens they’re no bigger than so-called “bridge” cameras of the sort that look like mini-SLRs. The fit and finish is very nice, and the lens casing feels top-notch. Some of my initial concerns still remain, especially the lack of true manual exposure control when shooting video along with the lack of a microphone input for video. Nevertheless, I came away more intrigued than before when I’d only read about them.

Answering some of the concerns about the video capabilities of the NEX-3/5 Sony is releasing a camcorder using the same large APS-C sized image sensor and interchangeable lens mount, named the NEX-VG10. The Luminous Landscape just published a hands-on review of the camcorder, giving it a qualified recommendation. It seems like most of the weaknesses of the camera lie in firmware — that is, features that are programmed in rather than part of the physical mechanics of the camera. In particular, there’s limited exposure monitoring making it difficult to see when you’re clipping the highlights. I find that omission particularly surprising, since it’s included in nearly every pro-sumer Sony camcorder I’ve used in the last decade.

The idea of having a still camera and a camcorder that can share lenses is quite exciting, as is having a true video camcorder–not just a still dSLR with video capabilities tacked on–sporting a large high-quality sensor that’s nearly the size of 35mm motion picture film. All the more amazing is that the still camera costs well less than a grand and the camcorder costs just under $200 with lens. This approach promises to be a game-changer in many of the ways that video dSLRs shook up the digital video world.

Panasonic has also announced its own version of an interchangeable lens camcorder based on still-camera sensor, the AG-AF100. Panasonic’s version is based around the micro 4/3 standard behind still cameras like the Olympus Pen series and the Panasonic GH-1. The AF100 is still a little further away from stores, and looks to be a bit more pro oriented than the Sony, with the inclusion of XLR mic jacks and more exposure options. It also looks to be more expensive, at a price around $6000.

I find the Sony cameras to be so interesting because of their price, and because I’m already an owner of a Sony dSLR. While Sony dSLR lenses don’t mount directly on the new cameras and camcorders, there is adapter that lets you use them.

I’m not quite ready to jump into a new camera, camcorder or lens-mount system, but am seriously considering taking the plunge with the NEX-5 or its successor. To add more grist to the mill, dSLR News Shooter has a short review of the NEX-5 as a video camera for the working journalist.

In any event, I will be keeping close watch to see what develops. Exciting times, indeed.

The best camcorder is the one you have with you

There’s a common idea amongst serious photographers that it’s a good idea to always have a camera on you, because you never know when you’ll see the stuff of a great picture. Seeing as how it’s often impractical to always have an SLR or other larger camera with you, many photogs adopted smaller point-and-shoot cameras they could easily toss into a bag or even keep in a pocket. In the digital age these are often called “serious compacts,” because they offer enough control for the experienced photographer without being enormous.

In fact, many photographers over the years have argued that the moment a great photo happens is far more important than the gear you use to shoot it. That’s why many will contend that your camera doesn’t matter or that the best camera is the one you have with you.

While these ideas seem to be quite common in still photography I don’t often hear them repeated in video circles. It could be that photos and video often are thought of differently, or perhaps serious videographers look upon video shot in the moment to be too much like bad home videos to be taken seriously. Or maybe it’s because it’s a very recent occurrence that there are video cameras that are as small as compact still cameras.

Home video camcorders are about thirty years old now, but for the first ten years of their existence they were big shoulder-mounted affairs. In the 1990s the birth of 8mm, VHS-C and then miniDV led to so-called “palmcorders.” Yet, they were still a little bigger than most film SLR cameras. That is to say, one might take it on vacation to record special moments, but only a dedicated few would take one on a walk through the park or to a party.

In the early 2000s there were several miniDV camcorders shrunk down to about the size of a couple of paperback books. While this seems to have encouraged more folks to carry camcorders with them, the relative delicacy of their complex tape mechanisms and the need to carry blank tapes still served as discouragement from keeping one in your bag all the time.

By 2005 the ability to record video crept into most point-and-shoot digital cameras. At this point I think a lot of average folks started to take more video, primarily because it was simple and built into the camera they were hauling around anyway. But the quality of the video still was lacking compared to a decent dedicated camcorder, often with much poorer sound. So while many more videographers played around with their digicam’s video function, it doesn’t seem like they were taken too seriously.

Now we’re finally at the point where there are good camcorders that will fit in your pocket. Whether it’s a Flip cam, a Sanyo Xacti like I use, a point-and-shoot digital camera with HD video or even an iPhone 4 it’s possible to shoot quite credible video using a device only slightly bigger than a miniDV videocassette. Thus begins the era wherein serious videographers can indulge in taking “video notes” of daily life and events in the way still photographers have been doing for decades.

I’ve realized that’s the real value to small camcorders, having the ability to easily shoot video without a lot of planning and schlepping. As a result I think I’ve shot more video with my Xacti VPC-CG10 in the last year than I shot with my miniDV camcorders over the previous nine years. The miniDV camcorders, as relatively small and easy to use as they were, still required more forethought and planning, along with carrying an extra bag for the camera and tapes.

What I’ve really enjoyed is shooting short “slice-of-life” videos that last no more than a few minutes once edited down. Not coincidentally, this is the perfect length to share on the web. So I also think that having the ability now to share HD quality video so easily on the web contributes to the value of the pocket-sized camcorder, where before the venues to share such video widely were quite a bit more limited.

I’ve got quite a bit of video in the queue waiting to be edited. Luckily, sometimes I end up with a solid 3 minutes that requires minimal editing. As an aside, while I still lament the lack of a proper microphone input jack in most small camcorders, I continue to be amazed at the quality of the sound recording in my Xacti VPC-CG10. It truly rivals the quality of dedicated digital audio recorders like the Zoom H2. The Xacti doesn’t quite measure up at the low-end, and emphasizes the midrange a little more than I’d like. But a little equalization cleans that up pretty easily. I now notice that the new Sanyo VPC-PD2 that I wrote about yesterday sports some fairly serious looking microphones that I am curious to hear.

Here’s a short video I shot of the classic post-punk band Mission of Burma at the Wicker Park Fest street fair here in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. This was shot hand-held from the crowd in the street. There was no room for a tripod or monopod. The only reason I was able to grab the video was because I had the camera in my bag and could easily grab it. I’m able to hold the Xacti much more still than a Flip style camcorder because of it’s pistol-grip design and flip out screen which makes for a more stable two-handed grip.

The sun was starting to go down so I switched the CG10 into black and white mode which I think works better in low light. I accidentally underexposed it a little, as I’ve learned that the LCD screen isn’t the most accurate way to judge exposure, so I had to boost the gamma in post. This makes the video a little more contrasty in a way that I like and is more film-like, but it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Putting the Xacti VPC-CG10 camcorder to work DIY style

As I’ve blogged before, I’m having a blast using my Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 palm-sized HD camcorder. I’m starting to hear about other videographers who appreciate the CG10 not just for its cost, size and HD, but also for its manual control over exposure and focus.

I just read a quick post at the Frugal Filmmaker about writer and actor Curtis Hendley using some great DIY lighting techniques to shoot video on his CG10. Frugal Filmmaker Scott Eggleston even points out the CG10′s manual controls. Also, make sure to take note of the fact that the CG10 in the photo is on a tripod, which is the best way to make sure your video comes out better and more polished.

I’m actually working on a blog post discussing how to put the Xacti camcorders’ manual controls to good use in just about any setting, and how that will make your video look just that much better than anything that comes from a Flip-style camcorder, or even a shiny new iPhone 4.

What video camera should I buy?

One of the most common questions I hear from educators looking to start producing video is one that I suspect a lot of readers have heard: “What camera should I buy?” On the surface it’s quite an innocuous query, seemingly simple to answer. Yet, bundled up in there is a very common and pernicious assumption, that the key to good video is all about the equipment you use.

Read the rest at OnlineVideo.net…

From miniDV to dSLR – Contemplating the New Era of Digital Video

When I saw the first miniDV digital camcorders in the late 1990s I was blown away by the edit-ready broadcast-quality picture they captured on tapes half the size of an 8mm videocassette and on cameras smaller than ever seen before. Yet, I couldn’t predict that only about a decade later we’d see the ability to shoot high-definition on tapeless cameras, with the ability to nearly instantaneously upload that video to the internet. In the previous ten years (roughly 1989 – 1999) we saw the evolution of the consumer camcorder from bulky shoulder-mount VHS and Beta cams to smaller, compact 8mm and Hi-8 camcorders. With Hi-8 we finally saw near-broadcast-quality video in compact cameras costing a few thousand dollars, rather than tens of thousands. That was certainly a leap, but still not as huge as what we’ve seen in the first decade of the 21st century.

The ground-breaking quality and adapatibility of DV and miniDV camcorders caused many independently-minded filmmakers to use the format to shoot films that would probably have been too expensive to undertake using film. Indie films like Mike Figgis’ Timecode, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s The Anniversary Party and Richard Linklater’s Tape come to mind. All were more experimental, in some specific regard, than even most independent films of the time. And all used the small form-factor of DV camcorders, along with the low-cost of shooting multiple cameras, to do things that maximized the utility of these features.

This reminiscence is sparked because this past week I had the opportunity to try out a colleague’s new HD video capable digital SLR, the new Canon Rebel T2i. The low cost and new HD quality threshold now transcended by video dSLRs are catalyzing a similar new wave of indie film and video innovation. So I was glad to finally have the opportunity to lay my hands on a video dSLR and put it through its paces, accompanied by my talented colleagues.

We tested it out in a studio with some studio lighting, using just a kit lens, to see how it would fare compared to HD video cameras that we use everyday, like the Panasonic HVX-200. The results were very impressive, arguably besting what I’ve seen with the current generation of prosumer HD camcorders used by educational and event videographers and indie filmmakers.
Read more »

What I’ve Been Up To Elsewhere

It looks like my challenge for 2010 is to see how many simultaneous writing projects I can keep up. What I’m learning so far is that the projects involving other people seem to gain my attention better than my nine-year-old blog here. Also, I enrolled in distance education certificate program that is also soaking up quite a few hours a week.

However, if you’re interested here’s some of the things I’ve written recently elsewhere.

At Radio Survivor I’ve discussed two of my favorite commercial radio stations, WDHA and WXRT. Yes, despite my undying loyalty to college, community and public radio, there have been a few commercial stations that rise above and make it into my radios once in a while.

Of particular interest to the typical mediageek reader should be my report on the fifty-nine new noncommerical radio licenses the FCC recently issued. Interestingly, five of these licenses went to current low-power FM stations.

I’ve stepped up my output for Streaming Media Magazine and StreamingMedia.com, trying to cover more stories related to video in education. My new biweekly series is called Video.edu. The first first edition I covered UCLA pulling streaming videos after receiving a legal threat and changes to educational technology funding in Obama’s 2011 budget. In the second one I wrote about the library copyright alliance defending educational streaming of copyrighted video and a Yale admissions video that’s gone viral.

My two most recent magazine columns are a 2009 year-in-review of video in education and a rumination on where is the teaching video camera of today.

Environmental Encroachment on the mediageek radioshow – sound, pictures and video

In a change of pace from the otherwise talk-dominated radioshow, my guests this week were the magic circus band Environmental Encroachment. They played several songs in WNUR‘s multi-use studio number 105, in addition to our interview. The show is now available for listening and download at the radioshow site.

Because the EE marching band is also a visual presence I took some photos and video [YouTube Vimeo] of the performance to give you a sense of what it’s like when the band plays out.

Big thanks go to my old friend and EE trombonist Dan Merlo for suggesting the idea, along with everyone in Environmental Encroachment for coming out to the show. Also, big thanks go to WNUR Airplay team members Lori Crasnic–for making all the arrangements to have the band in–and Lucas Seagall–for engineering the music portion of the show.

Making the HD Camcorder Leap with Sanyo’s Xacti VPC-CG10

Over the last three years I have not been shy about airing criticism of the newest wave of low-cost flash memory camcorders shooting alleged high-definition video. My critique has largely rested upon video quality being lower than established tape-based HDV camcorders and the difficulty of editing footage shot in the highly compressed AVCHD format.

The last time I posted on the topic was about a year ago when I took on Kodak’s entry into the field with the first HD camcorder priced under $200 the Zi6. I started to warm to the concept based upon the low price which then also makes higher quality videography more widely accessible. I never had a chance to get my hands on a Zi6 until very recently when I was in a store to check out a different model of inexpensive HD camcorder, which I’ll get to in a moment. The Zi6 takes on the Flip camcorder style form factor. That is, it’s shaped like a bar-style cellphone, with a lens on one side and a screen on the other. The controls are largely limited to record, stop and play with the intent to keep operation simple and easy.

Finally this year I began seriously to consider taking the plunge with one of these small HD camcorders. There were two motivations. First, I realized that I barely used my miniDV camcorder any more, bogged down by its relatively large size and the hassle of having to capture tapes in real-time. Second, I tried to make some videos using my digital camera. While the camera’s specs say it shoots video in a resolution equivalent to full standard definition DV (640×480) I found the resulting footage to be really lacking in quality. On top of that, the video files were recorded in a relatively inefficient and obsolete format.

Although the simplicity of the Flip-style camcorders hold some appeal for me, I’m really not sure I can be satisfied with their lack of manual adjustments, zoom and other basic camcorder settings. I recognize how the average user probably doesn’t care and doesn’t miss them, and that the Flip brand camcorders have succeeded because they deliver good video with absolute operational simplicity. But I’m a bit more of a power user than that.

Then I got wind of Sanyo’s newest and least expensive camcorder in their Xacti line, the VPC-CG10. I was enticed by both the price, under $200, and the fact that it has a real optical 5x zoom. Sanyo advertises the model as a “Dual Camera” because it is both a 10 megapixel still camera in addition to shooting 720p HD video. I learned that the Radio Shack near work had the Xacti and a few other low-cost HD cams in stock and stopped in on my way home to check them out.
Read more »

What Use Is Educational Video If You Can’t Find It?

My latest column for Streaming Media Magazine is online. In it I focus on the importance of being able to search through the mountains of educational video being produced every day:

That’s the next crucial step in educational video online: developing a common standard for cataloging, organizing, and sharing content, regardless of platform. We already have a model in libraries, which have common standards for cataloging physical assets such as books and discs. The successes and failures of this decades-long process should provide direction and insight for educational video.

In a similar vein, fellow SM writer and columnist Tim Siglin reported on discussions about time-based metadata for video that happened at the recent Open Video Conference:

Chris Jackson noted that URIPlay, an open-source project that MetaBroadcast has been working on with the BBC’s backing, started as an interface project but has ended up as a metadata play.

“Our core goal is to help people find moving images,” said Jackson, “but we’ve found we had to move well beyond user interfaces to the creation effective metadata tools and interfaces. We compared ‘closed code’ and ‘open code’ and realized that the pain threshold would be about the same initially for either type, but that the data range/quality of metadata could increase significantly if our open source code was used by the larger open source community. Our open software code revolves around metadata scraping and parsing.”

Although it all sounds a little technical, what’s at hand here is creating, storing and sharing data about video files so that the media itself is easier to find and use. The real trick is being able to search based upon more criteria than just titles or filenames, which often doesn’t result in much when video files are given names like “video01.mov.”

Searchability is accessibility and is truly one of the next most important steps in the development of online education, especially a more democratic online education.

I’ll be writing about more educational topics here at mediageek as that is what I do for a living and because I think the world of educational media is very connected to independent media and media freedom. Like so many disciplines, these worlds are too often siloed into their own self-contained universes, without a lot of cross-pollination. It looks like the Open Video Conference was one venue where the boundaries were crossed. I wish I could have gone, but I hope there will be more conferences like it.

Free Radio Berkeley Video: How To Make a Radio Station

The venerable Free Radio Berkeley has a (relatively) new video demonstrating all the parts in the air chain of a micropower unlicensed radio station, fresh from their Oakland, CA shop:

How To Make a Radio Station from Free Radio on Vimeo.