Cameras
Or not camera
If you’re going to join in the SciCast fun and help build “the world’s most entertaining science resource” (as Katie likes to call it), you need a video camera. Right?
Actually no, not necessarily. You could probably do something rather lovely with PowerPoint or Keynote, using your own still photos and Creative Commons-licensed pictures from Flickr.com. More on that another time, perhaps.
Assuming you’re going to make a video, however, here are your options:
Your mobile phone
You were all expecting me to point you towards swanky professional cameras, right? Well, yes — but personally I’m getting a huge kick out of making films with my phone. It’s a Nokia N95 and while I have to say it’s absolutely the worst telephone I’ve owned, it’s a moderately brilliant camera. The Mimosa pudica film was made with it, and I’ve been recklessly hanging it off a kite, too.
Mobile phones with video recording at this sort of quality are still rare, however. Sony Ericsson’s latest K850 records at only a quarter of the resolution, so it’ll be a while before we’re all carrying decent little video cameras without realising it.
New-fangled flashcard cameras
If the mobile phone companies have rather ignored the explosion of YouTube, the same can’t be said of the general consumer electronics industry. There’s a new breed of small cameras aimed at making it easier than ever to shoot, edit, and upload a film. They record onto SD cards, so when you’re finished shooting you flip the card out of the camera, bung it in the card reader you already use for your digital stills camera, and away you go.
Of course, your stills camera might already have a video mode - and some of them are very good indeed. But if you’re looking for a dedicated video camera of this sort the top dog is probably Panasonic’s SDR-S10. It’s expensive at about £250, but a lovely piece of kit with a remarkably good lens.
These things are very new, however, and the Panasonic is the only one I’ve seen personally. Toshiba’s Camileo Pro is much cheaper than the Panasonic at about £130, but I couldn’t find any reviews of it I believed. And it’s hard to recommend even cheaper models from Maplin and Misco without having seen what they shoot.
DV cameras
MiniDV tape is an old format, and if you walk into an electronics shop on the high street the sales staff will steer you away from it towards cameras that record onto mini DVD discs. But miniDV is still used professionally because it’s cheap, reliable, high-quality, easy to edit, and there’s a vast range of equipment supporting it. None of this is true of DVD-R as a recording format.
So in my book, genuinely ‘good’ video cameras start with miniDV. Look for a camera that has a microphone jack input (not Sony’s ridiculous shoe nonsense), and ideally a screwthread around the lens that will allow you to fit an accessory wide-angle adaptor, should you find you need one (and for filming demos, you probably will).
You also want a FireWire/iLink/IEEE1394 connection (they’re all the same thing). Ideally, the camera should do DV-in also — bizarre antipiracy trade laws will likely force you to pay another £30 for that, but it’ll allow you to archive your finished films back onto tape at full quality.
There are so many models changing so rapidly it’s hard to recommend anything specific, but in general I like the JVC range (they tend to have microphone inputs); Panasonic’s models are nice, particularly the ‘3CCD’ units that will give you better saturation and sharpness in good light; and some of the more expensive Canons are good too.
MiniDV cameras start at about £200 and head up beyond £5,000 (!). In general you get what you pay for: budget £350-£500 for something with worthwhile twiddly bits. Then add £50 for a wide-angle lens, £60 for a tripod, £35 for a microphone, and chuck in a spare battery too. It all adds up, and we haven’t even bought a bag yet. Ouch.
Everything else
There are some genuinely glorious little high-definition camcorders that record onto hard drives, but for our purposes they’re all a bit of a pain. The recording format they use (called “AVC-HD”) is almost impossible to edit unless you have a very new multiprocessor computer, and the high-resolution quality all gets thrown away when you publish to a website anyway. So I’d stick with DV if I were you.
There’s also a high-end almost-high-definition format called ‘HDV,’ that records onto standard miniDV tapes. This is actually a pretty good compromise, in part because there are some terrific HDV cameras out there. But you’re paying more than you would for standard DV and there’s really not much benefit for our purposes, so I’d save your money.
Closing thoughts
If you have experience of specific (current) camera models, thoughts about combinations that work for you, or any questions, please do drop us a line. We’ll try to keep the version of this document at the SciCast website up-to-date with your contributions.