Taking Care of Your Camcorder

Your camcorder is one of your most important weapons in the competitive war of digital filmmaking. Its also one of the more expensive weapons that you cannot afford to lose too soon - and hence, its always better to take good care of your DV Camera. However, you don't need to go to a film school to learn camcorder hygiene. Here are a few tips:

Water
A camcorder can be irreparable if damaged with water. Protect it from rain and wipe off moisture from the casing. Salt water is especially harmful, and can do damage to the outer casing as well as the inner workings.

Condensation
Some camcorders warn you if condensation is building up inside the camera and many will switch off automatically. To remedy this, take out the cassette, if the camera will let you. If it is not possible, switch off and wait 2 or 3 hours. Once you have removed the cassette, leave the cassette compartment open for 2 or 3 hours, to dry, in a non-dusty room at average temperature. Condensation is particularly problematic if you film in extremely cold places and the water freezes. If this happens, let the camera thaw naturally at room temperature and then go through the same process as for condensation.

Magnetized equipment
Any magnetic field can adversely affect recording. Television monitors, video games and loud speakers generate fields which distort picture quality. No lasting damage id done to the camera itself, but your footage could be ruined. Test how the camera performs if you are in any doubt and play back the results on a monitor. Occasionally, the actual mechanism of the camera can be affected, temporarily, but this is often solved by unplugging your power supply or removing the battery and then reconnecting.

Sunlight
Pointing the viewfinder at sunlight can do great damage to inner working parts. Worse, it can permanently damage your eyesight too.

Radio transmitters and power lines
If you have ever listened to radio near an overhead power line you will have heard an amount of interference. This noise badly affects your video recording, so avoid shooting near pylons or other high voltage lines. Radio transmitters will have a similar affect on the sound and image. Mobile phones also cause problems with sound interference while recording.

Excessive use
Many camcorders are not designed to be used for excessively long periods. as for example in surveillance filming; the inside temperature of the camera can cause malfunctions.

Dust and Sand
Take care when inserting the cassette that no fine dust or sand inters the camera. If you are using the camera in a potentially dusty environment, use a protective cover. If you don’t have a cover, you can improvise with a black bin-liner, wrapped around the casing. But beware that the camera could overheat over a period of time.

We shall continue with this topic in the next post.

Problems in Hot Plugging Devices

Usually, when a camcorder is hot-plugged — or attached via FireWire cable to the computer, your editing application will automatically recognize the connection, making the video immediately ready for import. However, problems can arise - the following paragraphs cover some of the more common ones:

Some applications won’t recognize camcorders connected to a daisy chain — i.e., a string of linked FireWire devices. For example, Apple’s popular iMovie software cannot import footage from DV camcorders attached via daisy chain. Likewise, many applications will not support the simultaneous use of multiple devices connected to your computer with FireWire because of driver conflicts. Typically, an operating system will assign a FireWire port to a single application at the exclusion of all other devices; when the application is shut down, the port is released for other uses.

Although most computers with six-pin FireWire connection can supply adequate power to FireWire peripherals, this is often not the case with digital camcorders. DV cameras require their own electrical sources and must be turned on with their own batteries or AC adaptors before they are recognized by the computer and its applications. Unfortunately, the computer’s internal power supply cannot supply sufficient DC voltage to operate a camcorder.

Never unplug a FireWire cable in the middle of a capture session. Hot pluggable devices are a tremendous convenience to computer users, but disconnecting them while importing DV footage can create a variety of technical problems—computer crashes, disk errors, damaged footage, missing data, and dropped frames, to name just a few. Make sure to stop your camcorder or finish your data transfer before removing a FireWire cable.

Hope you got the point!

Some Camera Acessories

Fisheye Lenses: An extreme example of a converter is the fisheye lens. Curved to a horizontal viewing angle of nearly 125 degrees, this attachment creates a high degree of barrel distortion, exaggerating the depth of scenes by pulling nearby objects closer and receding distant objects to the background. Used with lightweight digital cameras, this unique perspective often lends a sense of drama or excitement sporting events, action shots, and point of view footage from surveillance equipment.

Aquatic Housings: A number of companies design and manufacture water-proof aluminum housings for shooting video in undersea depths of up to 450 feet. Once you submerge a DV camera, however, you begin to lose proper light levels and esperience shifts in the color spectrum. For this reason many divers also use special aquatic lights, optics, and correction filters to increase color intensity and boost luminosity. Most water proof camera housing features mechanical controls that help you operate the camera functions without getting moisture into your camcorder.

Transvideo Handheld Prompter: The folks at TransVideo took their popular mattebox setup and replaced the heavy steel support rods with lightweight carbon equals, attached a 6-inch monitor to the front housing screws, and gave it some semi-reflective glass. The result is the versatile 4-pound Transvideo Handheld Prompter, ideal for crews using . Attached to a Canon XL-1, the entire system (monitor, prompter, and mattebox) weighs less than 13 pounds. Designed to work in full sunlight without a hood, the teleprompter allows the use of filters. The composite and VGA (60-Hz.) monitor can accept signals from any laptop and flip the image left, right, and upside down-necessary to view the mirrored text in the display glass. The Transvideo monitor can also be equipped with a wireless receiver and battery pack, making the same equipment useful as a client monitor on set.

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