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.
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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.
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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.

Inauguration Shows that the Internet Still Isn’t Broadcast

Last Tuesday’s presidential inauguration was one of those moments where I think all business except for vital functions like transit and public safety stopped all over the country as people tuned in to watch Obama’s swearing in. Another thing that stopped for a lot of people was the internet. Arguably this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest live streaming video events in the history of the event. It was also one of biggest tests for streaming video over the internet, and the results were decidedly mixed.

I was at work on Tuesday, where one of my responsibilities is providing instructional media support. As soon as I got in that morning I started getting requests from people all over our building to set them up to watch the inauguration. Now, the building I work in is poured concrete monstrosity that acts like a Faraday cage, successfully blocking reception of most broadcast signals. On top of that, there’s no cable TV in building. So I advised anyone who asked about getting a TV that they should consider viewing a live stream. Then I went to go set up a live stream in a large conference room with a video projector. At that moment I realized that maybe the live stream wasn’t going to work out so well, as it took many different attempts on several different sites before we could get anything to stream for more than a few seconds. That was around 30 minutes before the inauguration was set to begin.

When I returned to my office all attempts to get a stream there–whether from CNN, Ustream or even the CBC–resulted in failure. A few minutes after the ceremony began I received an email from our central IT network department, advising us that our multi-gigabit campus network had ground to a halt due to people watching the inauguration online. Looking at Twitter and the CNN live Facebook stream I saw that we were not alone, as folks all over the internet were finding it hard to get a reliable stream.

In the end it looks like about 7 million people were able to get live streams of the inauguration, according to Dan Rayburn whose estimates are based on talking to actual content distribution networks. By any standard that’s an impressive simultaneous viewership for the internet. But it’s less impressive compared to broadcast television, where 37.8 million people watched the inauguration.

More illustrative of the difference is the number of people who were denied the ability to watch the inauguration due to capacity limits. That is, another 37 million people could have tuned in to the inauguration on broadcast, cable or satellite TV while still leaving capacity for 37 million more. Whereas on the internet 7 million appears to be the upper limit — past that nobody else could watch.
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I Think I Must Admit that Laserdisc Is Dead

I have the sinking feeling that I might be forced to define my terms….

My pal Aj alerted me to this boingboing post about the news that Pioneer is ending production of laserdisc players. The funny thing is, I honestly didn’t think Pioneer was still making laserdisc players.

That’s not a joke. Although I’ve been a fan of the format, and new players are still available, I was under the impression that whatever you can buy are just backstock from the early 2000s.

I’ve had a laserdisc player since 1993, and currently have a collection of around 100 discs. Similarly to my vinyl collection, I cleaned up buying used discs around ’97-’98 when DVD hit the market and the early adopter videophiles dumped their LD collections for the next big thing. In that crucial transition period there was quite a bit of debate amongst hardcore videophiles and home theater enthusiasts–a tiny population compared to today–about the comparative benefits and deficits of DVDs versus laserdisc.

Perhaps the most infamous salvo in that particular battle came from indie filmmaker Kevin Smith in the original commentary track to the Criterion laserdisc release of his second film, “Chasing Amy.” (Yes, commentary tracks first debuted on laserdiscs taking advantage of their discrete analog and digital audio tracks, and Criterion got it’s start on laserdisc.) Smith begins his commentary–recorded around 1997–with, “Fuck DVD.” Words I’m sure he had to live down in just a few year.

Of course we now know that DVD soundly trounced laserdisc, which never grew past being a small cult format to begin with. While a lot of the late 90s debate sounded a lot like the analog vs. digital debate of the LP vs. CD argument, I think it’s safe to say that the relative charms of analog video in the form of laserdisc were not as alluring nor palpable as with vinyl records. I could go into a long dissertation on how that relates to the differences between audio and video recording (which is different than analog motion picture film), but I’ll spare you.

Unlike VHS, cassettes, LPs and photographic film, I think laserdisc is really dead. While the machines that record and play those other formats may be less widely available than in their heyday, you can still buy blank media and new player/recorders. With laserdisc it’s been a good eight years or so since a new laserdisc release has been commercially available. Furthermore, it was never a consumer-recordable format, so no recording your own discs. Without a commercially available program on laserdisc, the player isn’t much use.

Now, there were thousand of movies and other programs released on laserdisc during the format’s 20+ year run, and there are still some films on laserdisc that have yet to see the light on DVD (though the number is dwindling). So if you have a decent laserdisc collection and a player, the format’s not dead to you.

But in the broader view, laserdisc must be declared a dead format . We won’t be seeing any new laserdisc releases, and I’d be surprised if there were any pressing plants still left in operation. Now there will be no more new players, when even enthusiasts like me thought they weren’t being made anyway.
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