The age of the digital video camera is here. Out with the VHS or SVHS camera you have stored away in the box. Those things are old school now. It is time to join the new reality. DV has come along and pushed it off the shelf. DV has been on the market for a few years now and has been sticking its toes in the waters of the video world to see if it was ready to make a splash. Well as a digital video producer let me tell you it is time. There are so many cool digital video camera products out on the market now, the technology is booming and pretty soon we are all going to be shooting in this format.
What can you do with DV that you can't with old tape formats? Well let me tell you there is so much to that question. Let's start with size. Everything is smaller and more compact which is a good thing. Then you have better quality, the ability to transfer the video into your computer for editing via high speed Firewire connections (also called IEEE ), and the quality stays with the video throughout the entire editing process unlike tape. Wow if your video is gorgeous going in it is gorgeous coming out and that is a wonderful thing.
I have taken the Sony PD 150 digital video camera on a variety of shoots that you would never take a larger more cumbersome camera. However that does not mean that I compromised the video in any fashion.
Take for instance the story I shot on a a female skier from Lebanon who was in Salt Lake City for the Olympics a few years back. We wanted to go on the mountain and interview her, see her being coached, and then see her training on the slalom runs. The PD 150 was small enough to take along in my backpack (padded of course in case of a fall) and yet powerful enough to take some wonderful video. I raced alongside of her as she zoomed through the slalom course, then ran the course myself with the camera down at snow level to give the ultimate feeling of speed. You could almost feel the chatter of the snow as my skis carved the hill. I had full control over my audio, exposure, and color balance so that the video came out looking terrific.
That story ended up having a great sense of the mountain, of the energy of the skier we were profiling, and all becasue the DV cam allowed us to go where we wanted without limitations.
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