HDTV Prices To Lower

Hope you didn’t buy your big screen TV last month…

According to Gizmodo, Sony is leading a huge price drop next month.

According to HD Guru, Sony's not content with its less-than-number-one status in flat panels, so it's planning to claw its way back into consumers' hearts with deep price cuts on all of its 2008 models next month. The other guys, like Samsung, LG and Sharp, are already planning their own price war counter-attacks. And then, in reaction to the wave of cheap LCDs, plasma dudes like Panasonic will prolly be doing their own slashing. Conclusion: Wait till May/June to buy an HDTV, 'cause it'll be mucho cheaper.

To give you an idea of how much you might save, for instance, Sony's cutting $400 off its 46-inch KDL-46S4100, to $1599, and $500 off its newest 1080p 40-incher, to $1199. So we're looking at discounts in the 20-25 percent range, which is none too shabby, and definitely worth holding off for a couple weeks on your Best Buy TV hunting expedition

So You Want To Buy A New HD Camcorder . . .

Here are some issues to consider when you purchase your new camcorder

1. Storage Media Type: Currently, High Definition camcorders are available that record to one or more of these four media: MiniDV tape, built-in Hard disk drive, MiniDVD-R/RW discs, and SD or MemoryStick (Sony) flash cards. The primary differences here are cost, time capacity and compression algorithm used. MiniDV tapes cost about $3.00 each and hold one hour of HD video at 25 megabits per second, and use HDV (MPEG-2) compression. Hard drive, DVD, and Flash card cameras all use AVCHD (MPEG-4) compression at 15 megabits per second;. The AVCHD compression algorithm is a much more aggressive compression than HDV, and most cameras using it have somewhat poorer image quality in low-light situations. AVCHD is also more difficult and processor intensive to edit, requiring a computer with more power than is needed to edit HDV video. Following are some specific's

ADVANTAGES OF MINI-DV TAPE: It's very cheap and widely available, costing about $3.00 per one hour of video storage capacity. It's easier to edit HDV video than AVCHD video, and HDV offers better image quality in low light. The tape itself is also your archival media, and should last at least 10~15 years if you store it in a suitable container that protects it from moisture, dust, and temperature extremes. It takes 3 single-sided DVD's to hold the video from one Mini-DV tape if you want to use DVD's as your back-up archival media.

DISADVANTAGES OF MINI-DV TAPE: For editing purposes it requires real-time video transfer via Firewire; if you have a full 60 minute tape, it takes 60 minutes of real time to download your video to your computer. Also, the 25 megabit per second bandwidth may be too much for many older computers: even if you already have a Firewire card installed, if your computer's CPU, data bus, or hard drive can't accept the data stream at the rate it's being transmitted by the camera, you will at least lose frames and at worst, the whole captured video file could be trashed and unplayable. Tape drive cameras are more sensitive to humidity than the other types; condensation inside the camera's tape compartment will shut it down, requiring you to bring it indoors to an air-conditioned space to dry out. Motor noise from the tape drive can be picked up by the camera's built in microphones.

2. ADVANTAGES OF HARD DRIVE CAMERAS These cameras store the full 1920 x 1080i high def video; MiniDV tape cameras using HDV compression actually record only 1440 x 1080i (non-square pixels), requiring a resampling of the video in post-production to get 1920 x 1080i. Lots of storage capacity: Up to 5 hours on the 40 megabyte drive is possible. Fast and easy video transfer to your computer via USB; you don't need to install a firewire port if your PC doesn't have one already. Transferring an hour's worth of video from an HG-10 to a computer takes a lot less time than the same transfer on a miniDV type of camera.. Less motor "whine" in the audio track than you have with tape drive cameras. Less sensitivity to environmental problems like dust and moisture.

DISADVANTAGES OF HARD DRIVE CAMERAS: A little more expensive purchase price. The greatest disadvantage currently is the AVCHD compression: compared to HDV compression used in MiniDV tape cameras, it's harder to edit in post-processing software, and requires a more powerful computer. AVCHD video shows a LOT more noise and compression artifacts in low-light shots than you get with HDV video.

3.ADVANTAGES OF DVD CAMCORDERS: Only one that I can think of, and that's the ability to put the disc into a DVD player and view it, or transfer it to computer. Transfer of video to computer same as HDD (via USB) is so much faster than Tape drive. One manufacturer recently came out with a high def camcorder that stores to Mini-BlueRay discs. I don't know for sure what the blank discs would cost, but you can bet they're way more expensive than regular 8cm DVD-RW's

DISADVANTAGES OF DVD CAMCORDERS: Expensive media in terms of cost-per-minute. The small, 8cm DVD's used in these camcorders have very limited capacity, only about 15~20 minutes at the highest image quality. DVD cameras tend to be bulkier, since the 80mm diameter disc takes up a lot of space compared to a 64mm wide x 45mm tall MiniDV tape. AVCHD Compression; same issues as for HDD cams in terms of loss of image quality and difficulty to edit in post-processing.

4. ADVANTAGES OF FLASH CARD CAMCORDERS: No moving parts in the storage media. This should mean longer service life and greater reliability. If flash memory continues to grow in capacity while dropping in cost, this type of camcorder could eventually be the end of Tape, HDD, and DVD. Easy transfer of video to PC over USB bus.

DISADVANTAGES OF FLASH CARD CAMCORDERS: This media is the most expensive storage media: $140.00 for a 16 gigabyte SD card, compared to $3.00 for a 13 gigabyte MiniDV tape. The system uses AVCHD compression; same issues as for HDD and DVD cams in terms of loss of image quality and difficulty to edit in post-processing.

It's Not Too Late To Produce Your Wedding Video

If your wedding video consists only of raw footage shot by family and friends because your budget would not allow for professional videography services, don't despair. You can still have a great wedding video by letting Long Video Services edit together the perfect wedding video for you.

You can save substantial money if you have your video and photos organized. Photos are easy to organize by placing a small yellow sticky note on the back of each photo, but how do you organize the video? Well, video is organized by "logging" each tape. Logging is a process whereby you revise/playback the footage and write down the starting times and the stopping times for each scene you select.

You can make your own log sheets in a word processor, a spreadsheet or even a piece of paper with rows and columns. Use the rows and columns to record the information about the tapes you are "logging"

You will need rows for the wedding name, the date, the name of the camera person, and a video tape number. This is very important if the raw footage comes from more than one camera person that used more than one tape. This way you will know who shot the video and which cassette you are logging.. Also, don't forget to number your log sheets. (page ___ of ___} This will help from getting lost when there are multiple log sheets.

The sheets could be made with twenty rows, divided into four columns. Label the columns as follows: "Description" "Scene Start Time" Scene Stop Time" "Comments".

As the tapes are played back during the logging process, write down a description of the scene ("mother of bride with groom" or "maid of honor with best man" as an example) Write down the time when the action starts and write down the time when the action stops.

Most of the new digital camcorders automatically record a time code on your tape. This "time code" does not show up on your video, however. It will show up on your playback display.

Older VHS formats did not automatically record a time code on the tape. Before viewing the footage, be sure to reset the player's counter to 00:00:00 for each tape before you start logging.

You should rate or "comment" on each of the log entries. ("do not use", "important scene" as an example)

Logging and organizing are crucial for keeping the cost of editing at a minimum.

Video editing is a very creative and exhilarating process. We, at Long Video Services, have years of experience in magically editing raw footage. With the addition of titles, special effects, and musical backgrounds, we can create your perfect wedding video for you.

Wedding, anniversaries, and video biographies are only a few of the services offered by Long Video Services.

Check out our website http://www.longvideoservices.com/

STLVA Christmas Party

The St Louis Videographers Association celebrated their annual Christmas Party at the home of Claudia Walters of Copy Cat Video. Claudia's home sits just above the Mississippi River, high upon the bluffs, in Alton, Illinois. The recent snowfall provided a beautiful setting for the event and the deer frolicking in Claudia's wooded back yard created a special holiday feeling. Claudia and her husband, Bob, extended their warm hospitality as guests arrived.

Members enjoyed a warm fire by the relaxing, wood burning, fireplace as they sampled Gert Booher's home made Wassail. For those who are not familiar with wassail, it is a hot, special spiced punch often associated with the holiday season. The drink resembles that of a mulled cider and was often served at medieval feasts. Quite tasty!

Everyone enjoyed the delicious buffet which included several home made desserts. By the end of the evening, the guests were quite full and well wassailed.

STLVA members are hard working professionals who truly love the industry of video and photography. It is always refreshing to attend a celebration where industry friends can join together for a relaxed evening of cheer.

Several members brought some of their "must see" works which were shown at the party. There were also prizes given out as a drawing. Useful products from Anton Bauer, educational DVD's, chances to win the new Anton Bauer lighting system, and the possibility to attend a one-on-one seminar with a nationally known industry leader.

Matt Schmitt, Art of Film Productions, attended the party with his girlfriend, Chamaine. Matt completed his application for STLVA membership at the party. The group looks forward to welcoming him as the newest STLVA member at their January meeting.

Great Time!

St. Louis Videographers Association website. http://www.stlva.com/

Check it out!

Need A Wedding & Event Planner?

If you are looking for a good wedding or event planner, check out http://www.stlouisweddingplanning.com/ Event planning and coordination includes: Budget consulting, finding vendors and setting up appointments. Thy help with all the details such as gift bags, travel arrangements, center pieces, decorating, etc. St. Louis Wedding and Event Planners will make sure that when your guests arrive, everything will be ready and perfect. They plan each event as if it were their own. Check out their website or give them a call at 314-537-6678. Ask for Jenn and tell her you heard about her company from Jim & Linda Long at Long Video Services.

Corporate Video - A New Approach

Corporate Video is Dead. Long live Corporate Video.

If that doesn’t seem to make sense, think of the changes that have come with the digital age. We have more and more access to media – but less and less time to watch it. Audiences want information and ideas that are specific to them. They want it to be practical, useful, immediate.

The days of the traditional 20 minute training or corporate video production are numbered. But there’s nothing wrong with video. It can be extremely powerful and involving – far more so than some of the read-along material that’s passed off as e-learning. We just need to rethink how video is produced and delivered.

Luckily, just as the digital age has made people lose patience with traditional corporate or training video production, it’s given us the means to produce and deliver it in new ways. It’s given us much greater flexibility.

Think of the DVD you rent or buy at Blockbuster. It’s got a menu. As well as letting you watch a feature film, it often gives you additional material – the film of the film, biographies, outtakes and so on.

Corporate and training video productions can do exactly the same, and even more so if it’s on CD-ROM, with its greater interactivity.

Imagine you load the disk. A menu appears. There are a choice of modules:

• a 90-second, high-impact animated caption video, which grabs the attention and puts over the key points. This is ideal for presentations to busy senior managers, to fire up enthusiasm at the start of a course or to run on the plasma screen in reception or the staff restaurant.

• a number of short video modules addressing specific issues. You can show these in any order or leave out modules which are not relevant to your audience. These might be drama, interviews, documentary, technical animation – any of the traditional video formats

• a resources section – documents, forms, handouts, intranet links, slide shows – a complete toolkit for your training session

Is this more expensive to produce than a conventional 20-minute training video? No! That’s another joy of the digital age. Production and authoring costs have come down. You get a lot more bang for your buck.

Please contact us if you’d like more information on this type of production.

Beware Of The Tapeless Camcorder?

When geeks sit down to tell their children about nature’s great cycles, they don’t talk about birth and death. They talk about the way bulky gadgets get smaller over time, expensive ones become commodities — and how recording tape always gives way to digital storage.

Usually, the death of tape is a good thing. Not many people survey their DVD collections and pine for the VCR days, or heft their iPods and mourn for the days of eight-tracks and cassettes.

But in camcorders, the demise of tape is a little more complicated.

Most consumer camcorders still record onto tape but that won’t last much longer. Sales of MiniDV digital tape camcorders are plummeting, from about half the market last year to only 31 percent this year. Camcorders that record onto miniature DVDs (29 percent) or little hard drives (22 percent) are about to overtake them.

The reason, obviously, is the hassle factor. Even now, you might have cassettes that are piling up in your closet, recorded but unwatched, simply because it takes so much time and effort to find the right tape and then the part you want. If you had a DVD camcorder, you may figure, you could just grab your cruise vacation disc and pop it into your TV’s DVD player.

Maybe you still hope to edit all your tapes someday into enjoyable, watchable highlight reels. After all, both Macs and Windows PCs come with software that lets you edit MiniDV footage and then burn the resulting masterpiece onto a DVD, or play it back onto a fresh tape with 100 percent of the original picture quality.
But life keeps intruding on your plans, and you’re finally giving up on the fantasy that you’ll really edit those piles of tapes. Meanwhile, these new tapeless camcorders end the tyranny of rewinding and fast-forwarding; you can jump directly to play back any scene. Who could resist?

Actually, there are several more reasons you might want to resist, or at least to pause.

Capacity and price are two of them. Few people realize, for example, that the miniature discs required by those DVD camcorders hold only 15 minutes of video. The discs cost around $3 each, which is steep on an hourly basis. The newer “dual layer” discs hold 27 minutes, but cost $7 apiece. MiniDV tapes, on the other hand, still cost about $3 and hold 60 or 90 minutes.

Hard-drive and memory-card camcorders have a different problem: once the drive or card is full, the camcorder is useless until you empty it onto your computer. (You can buy a spare memory card, of course, but most people can’t afford to accumulate stacks of them.)

Picture quality is another consideration. The video signal on MiniDV tape provides terrific color, contrast and clarity. MiniDV camcorders are so good, they’re occasionally used for broadcast TV shows and even movies The picture quality of high-definition tape camcorders, which also record onto standard MiniDV cassettes, is even more amazing.

Most tapeless camcorders, on the other hand, store video in a variation of a format called MPEG-2. It looks positively crude next to MiniDV, with blown-out whites, muddy blacks and grain everywhere between. Not many editing programs recognize MPEG-2, either.

That situation is improving. Last year, Sony and Panasonic developed a new format, expressly for high-definition tapeless camcorders, called AVCHD. On the right camcorder, and at its highest quality setting, the AVCHD picture is gorgeous. (It’s a relative of the format used by Blu-ray high-definition DVDs.)
But AVCHD presents a different kind of burden: editing it requires a monster computer. See our October article on AVCHD.

In theory, tapeless camcorders ought to be ideal companions to editing software. When you get right down to it, they hold nothing more than a bunch of computer files. You should be able to copy them to your computer in a matter of seconds, rather than playing them from the camcorder in real time.

In practice, the story isn’t quite so simple. The AVCHD format wasn’t designed for editing; it was designed to cram a lot of video data into as little storage space as possible. Its footage is heavily encoded, and only a few editing programs can handle it. They include the latest versions of Sony Vegas, Ulead VideoStudio, Pinnacle Studio Plus, and (for the Mac) iMovie and Final Cut Pro.

Some of these programs, like Apple’s, work by converting the balky AVCHD files into a format that they can edit — and that conversion can take a crazy amount of time; 60 minutes of AVCHD video takes more than two hours to prepare for editing.

Most Windows programs, like Pinnacle, can edit AVCHD without conversion; instead, you experience short delays each time you try to play a clip or apply a transition.
But to edit AVCHD smoothly in any of these programs, you need a serious, honking slab of computer. For iMovie ’08, that means an Intel-based Mac and at least 1 gigabyte of RAM; for Pinnacle, that’s at least 1.5 gigs of RAM, plus a Core 2 Duo 2.4-gigahertz chip or faster. Finally, consider the future. Suppose, for example, that you buy a hard-drive or memory-card camcorder. And suppose that, when the card or disk gets full, you dutifully copy the movies to your computer.

But then what? You can’t just leave them on the PC’s hard drive forever; they take up too much room, and your current hard drive won’t still be around 20 years from now. Even if you keep buying new, bigger ones every few years, are you sure you want to entrust your only copy of your home movies to something as crash-prone as a hard drive?

The only cheap long-term solution is to burn the movies onto DVDs — a time-consuming hassle that you can’t postpone. MiniDV cassettes, on the other hand, are self-archiving; once a tape is full, you can just stick it in a drawer. In other words, all tapeless camcorder footage eventually winds up burned to DVD. And that presents the final concern: longevity.

Unfortunately, nobody knows how long recordable DVDs last; they haven’t been around long enough. According to aging simulations by the government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, a homemade DVD can last anywhere from “a few weeks” (if left in direct sunlight) to “several tens of years” (if you buy the most expensive discs and keep them in their cases, in the dark, at a constant, cool temperature, and so on).

Of course, tapes don’t last forever, either. In both cases, you have to remain vigilant. Once every 10 years, you should recopy your videos onto fresh tapes, discs or whatever the most promising storage gadget is at the time. All of this brings up larger questions: What, exactly, is the point of home video? Why do we make it? Who is the audience?

Some people hope that their children will want to watch these movies when they’re grown, or even their grandchildren. Others shoot video only as a short-term record, intended to be shared on YouTube or a DVD that gets passed around. As the popularity of cameraphone video demonstrates, sometimes the last things people care about are quality and longevity.

That’s why, for some people, the problems with tapeless camcorders are irrelevant. For some purposes, convenience trumps all.But everyone else should keep the advantages of MiniDV in mind: storage price, capacity, quality, editability and archivability. The death of tape may be an inevitable part of nature, but it would be nice if that moment didn’t arrive until we had an unequivocally superior replacement.

This article was published in the New York Times September 20, 2007