MiniDV is the new Super 8
The recent spike of interest to Super 8 cameras perplexes me — less than 3 minutes of footage per cartridge, no sound, wobbly picture.
Frankly, a 1980s VHS camcorder could shoot a better quality video…
…not even mentioning a Hi8 camcorder from 1990s.
The Super 8 evangelists keep saying that the only way to produce real movies is to use celluloid. This, of course, is patently false, your neighborhood movie theater digitally projects movies that have been digitally shot and digitally edited. Even if you shoot on film, the processed Super 8 cartridge is mailed back to you along with a digitized copy of your reel.
There is no escape from digital.
Just like electric cars were pushed aside by smelly and noisy tin lizzies for more than a century, the concept of electronic image transmission was developed before the movies appeared.
Some ideas take centuries to turn into viable products, like Leonardo’s helicopter or Jules Verne’s submarine.
We should be happy that the time of inexpensive electronic image capture, storage and distribution has finally arrived.
It is true that early video cameras had obvious visual telltale signs like:
- pulsing of the image, caused by instability of the vidicon pickup tube;
- color aliasing;
- color shimmering;
- combing caused by incorrect deinterlacing of interlaced video;
- skewing and jello effects caused by vacuum pickup tubes scanning the image line by line;
- “live” look of broadcast interlaced video having 50 or 60 images per second, unlike 24 frames per second in traditional movies;
- stair-stepping caused by insufficient vertical resolution;
- narrow dynamic range, overexposure of bright areas, yet low sensitivity in low light conditions.
But by the end of 1990s these problems were largely solved. CCD sensors revolutionized video production, ensuring that the whole frame — or at least a whole field — was captured at once, a feature known as global shutter.
Image stability was increased, “film look” could be obtained when shooting at 24, 25 or 30 frames per second in progressive-scan mode. Widescreen mode and cinematic gamma profile brought video even closer to the movie look.
By the end of 2000s CCD sensor technology was replaced with CMOS technology, which promised better sensitivity, higher resolution, lower power consumption, but it brought back the dreaded rolling shutter that vacuum tubes were known for.
Which is why I think that a standard definition digital camcorder with CCD imaging sensor is the perfect compromise between celluloid-based movies of yore and the shiny digital solid-state world of the 21st century.
The MiniDV cassette gives tactile satisfaction similar to a Super 8 cartridge.
Both MiniDV and Super 8 cameras make noise when filming, although a Super 8 camera has a delightful trigger action that is lost on video cameras. A start/stop button that has to be pressed just once is a great convenience, but it somewhat robs from the thrill of the process of shooting.
A Super 8 cartridge holds 50 ft, or about 15 meters of film, good enough for anything between two and a half and three and a half minutes depending on frame rate. A MiniDV cassette holds 70 meters of magnetic tape, with each frame taking about as much as two human hairs, so the whole tape is good for one hour of video.
Just like in the Super 8 domain, DV cameras run the gamut from simple to semi-professional.
The Canon Elura 100 is a spiritual counterpart to the original Kodak Instamatic Super 8 camera: a small box with a small lens on one end and buttons on another end — just turn on and shoot.
The packaging is very tight: a small battery is hidden under the flip-out screen, and the tape mechanism takes almost all remaining space. The camcorder manages to have very few buttons despite that the screen is not touch-sensitive, it uses a simple slider for the lens cover, does not even have a shoe for accessories, and it shoots interlaced video only. It saves still photos to a multimedia card.
There are both FireWire and USB ports, but the USB port is used only to transfer still photos; to transfer video you need to use FireWire. It can shoot both in 4:3 and widescreen mode, has a microphone input, and allows controlling exposure and focus manually using this joystick on the back. I bought this camera when my son was born, and used it for several years until I got an HD camera.
And here is a totally different beast, the Panasonic GS500.
I have no doubt that it will become a popular collector item not unlike a Braun Nizo, Canon or Beaulieu Super 8 cameras, especially the PAL version, which shoots at 25 fps and records 576 lines per each progressive frame, 20% more than an NTSC version.
Sadly, by 2006, when the GS500 model came out, the era of standard definition video has all but come to an end, so this camera is a modest update and in some ways a downgrade to the venerable GS400, which will remain in history as the pinnacle of consumer DV video, with tons of manual controls and with the LCD screen as large as on the professional DVX100. On the other hand, I find the GS400 too bulky and dare I say, too ugly. The GS500 looks much sleeker.
Like most DV camcorders, both the Canon and the Panasonic use CCD sensors, which means that the video they shoot does not suffer from rolling shutter artifacts. But the Panasonic, being a higher-end camcorder, employs three CCD sensors, not just one, to deliver rich colors. It offers Cinema Gamma for gentle highlight roll-off and better resilience to overexposure. And it can shoot in progressive mode, which kills three birds with one stone: it avoids interlaced combing, doubles vertical resolution, and renders motion very similar to film.
The camcorder offers complete exposure control, a focus ring, an external microphone input, tilt-up eyepiece in addition to the flip-out screen, and of course, a cold shoe on the top and a tripod mount on the bottom. The ability to upload video on a computer via USB is important, because few modern computers have a FireWire port.
Before the Panasonic DVX100 and the Canon XL2 came out, digital filmmakers would shoot with a PAL camcorder, slow the video down to 24 fps and author it to DVD for American release. Nowadays I don’t need to do this, I can simply upload 25p video on YouTube.
