| STARTING FROM SCRATCH |  |
YOUR FIRST CAPTURE |
| THE CAMERA | YOUR FIRST EDIT | |
| THE COMPUTER | BEYOND RAW FOOTAGE | |
| THE SOFTWARE | YOUR FIRST EXPORT | |
| YOUR FIRST SHOOT | YOUR FIRST DVD | |
| YOUR FIRST PLAYBACK | WHERE TO GO FROM HERE |
BETA 2.06A
Brought to you by BurlyBuff's Student Filmmaking Resources Department. please direct your questions and correspondence to burlybuff@hotmail.com
STARTING FROM SCRATCH |
Welcome to BurlyBuff’s new venture into the world of HOW TO. With 15+ years combined experience in the video medium, we’ve discovered a system of tools, processes & development that have become surprisingly affordable, almost universally available, and secretly easy. ANYONE with a working video camera, tape, and battery can produce everything from home movies to award-winning films, music videos, commercials, television programs, gallery art, business presentations, instructional DVDs, and streaming web content – all for fractions of pennies on the dollar of Hollywood & industry productions. How can we say this? Because as starving college students and minimum wage workers we’ve made all of these, purely out of pocket. Our money-back guarantee is that our (free) tutorial will get every participant with a camera, tape & battery up to speed enough to share an idea, capture a moment, teach a lesson, sell a product, and make use of that technology sitting on your shelf.Not know a thing about video? Don’t own a stitch of equipment? Never seen a movie or a TV show? No problem. This tutorial assumes you have just arrived on planet Video and everything is foreign to you. By the end you will have applied for citizenship, bought a home, and joined the country club.
If you really want to get into what video is, read on. If you would rather just get your hands on a camera and capture some action, skip onto "Step Two – Your First Camera"...
Prepare yourself for some technical stuff, I'll do my best to explain it simply. For you brave hearted few who read on, you'll be able to grasp some concepts that will be referenced throughout the guide, and really have an idea of what's going on when you watch a movie or tv show.
Video is a form of storing moving images.
Film is another form of storing moving images.What’s the difference? A LOT!
There are differences in how each works
Film captures a series of images on celluloid by exposing chemicals on the surface to the light reflecting off a subject (inside a motion picture camera), stores them in succession on the strip of film, from which copies can be made through exposing more chemical-coated celluloid with light passed through the original strip. These strips of film can be played back by sending through a projector which shines light through each image in succession producing moving images on a screen.
Video is electronic, not physical images. This time light is captured (recorded) by electronic sensors which convert the image into an electronic signal. This signal can be stored in many number of ways, in many forms, but commonly to a tape. A tape contains a long strip of plastic which may look kind of like film, but is actually plastic with tiny metal pieces layered all over the surface. The electronic signal magnetically charges some of these tiny pieces with positive or negative charges. The tape is played back by translating those magnetic pieces back into an electronic signal (a stream of moving electrons) that is sent through the cathode of a television tube (a filament like in a light bulb, negatively charged) that repels the negative electrons toward 2 anode (positively charged parts) that focus the electrons into a beam and accelerate them onto the phosphor layer inside the screen, lighting up points which when viewed together from a distance reproduce the original image’s light.
THAT’S THE TECHNICAL SIDE. The key is that film is a physical medium where light makes a print on the film strip, video is an electronic medium where light is converted to a signal.
Why do you need to know this? Because the differences in these technical processes are responsible for much of why film people and video people can’t seem to get along.
There are differences in the cost.
A VHS tape may cost a dollar or two, and holds 30min - 3hrs of images.
A miniDV tape may cost 3-5 dollars and holds 30-90min of images.
A fullsize DVD may cost 10-50 cents and holds 1-3 hours of images.
One of the most expensive tapes, D5, may cost 300 dollars and hold 2 hours of images.8mm film reel may cost 12-18 dollars and hold 1-5 min of images.
16mm film reel may cost 20-30 dollars and hold 1-5 min of images.
35mm film may cost $18,000-58,000 and hold 5-7 min of images.But where video is ready to view and copy once recorded, film requires processing, an added cost on top of video.
8mm processing may cost 7-15 dollars a reel.
16mm processing may cost 20-30 dollars a reel.
35mm processing may cost 150-250 dollars a reel.Total Average Cost per min:
VHS: $.01 / min
miniDV: $.06 / min
DVD: $.002/ min
D5: $2.50 / min8mm film: $11.00 / min
16mm film: $23.00 / min
35mm film: $3,000.00 / minThen there’s the camera.
You can pick up a VHS, C-VHS, Hi-8 or maybe an older DV camera at a garage sale for maybe 5-50 dollars. You can find 8mm or 16mm at those same garage sales for 5-50 dollars. Buying new, the cheapest VHS camcorder will run about $50-75, and the cheapest 8mm camera will run about $100. The finest HD video cameras can cost millions, 35mm cameras can cost millions. The consumer will most likely spend about $300-1000 on a miniDV camcorder (most common format), $100-500 on a film camera (8mm or 16mm).
Add it up, and per minute film will most likely cost more than video.
THAT’S THE FINANCIAL SIDE. The key is that both mediums can get very expensive, and that doesn’t cover any of what you put in front of the camera.
There are differences in the visual quality.
Some of the biggest controversy arises from the artistic and qualitative differences of the mediums. Film history had about 50 years on video, during which time it developed as an art form with established techniques and accepted guidelines. Many filmmakers refuse to work in video, nor give it the artistic merit of film. Likewise, there are videographers who can't see past the added cost, limited post production capabilities, and institutional foundations of the film industry. However, much can be attributed to visual preference, in much the same way that record collectors and CD or mp3 listeners may never find common ground.
One thing can be compared, however – resolution. Resolution, in terms of image capture, is the amount of detail that can be recorded to a medium, and subsequently, how far you can zoom into that image before it loses the original picture. Film captures as much light definition as the chemicals on the film strip can reproduce. Film size and grain, or the spotiness of a film frame at a certain aperture & shutter speed, used to determine the resolution of an image. In current terms a pixel, or a point of light on a TV, computer monitor or projector can be used to compare film with video. For decades video was intended for television playback. In the Americas and many Asian countries TVs display about 640 pixels per line, 525 lines down the screen (this is called NTSC broadcast standard). Much of the rest of the world's TVs display 625 lines down. Either way, the average tv showed 20-30,000 pixels. Compare this with an average 15-20 million pixels in a 35mm frame and it pales in detail. With computer monitor technology bumping play back resolution capability 1.7+ billion pixels (Apple's 30in Cinema Display), video made the jump to HD, where 1080p contains over 2 billion pixels. So it may be that the image quality may not place film above video in pure resolution comparison.
However, there's more to visual quality than size. Color replication by video has long paled in comparison with films ability to capture much of the visual spectrum with detailed shadows and highlights. Video has jumped from 8 color to 16+ million, called true color. But in reality it can be argued that there are infinite colors in light. No method of recording images can capture every color that light creates, even our eyes can only detect so many variations, so if both mediums involve proper image preparation they may be about on par.
The last visual difference I'll cover is one that, while purely technical, may be to blame for our ability to recognize when we're looking at film and when we're looking at video. Frame rate. Both mediums record and display a series of still images which our eyes read together to reproduce motion in our mind. Film commonly records at 24 frames per second, or for every second of film 24 still images are projected in whole, and has for almost a century. We've grown accustomed to this at the movie theater and there's a smoothness that 24 frame per second reproduction offers. Due to electrical regulations, video has long displayed 29.97 frames per second in the Americas & Asia, 25 frames per second in much the rest of the world. But it displays these frames as in two parts, every other line from the incoming picture and the opposite lines from the last frame, sort of blending them. The result is that video often captures a more crisp image, closer to how fast our eye captures. Some people find it more realistic, but most say it feels more invasive, disturbingly realistic, and loses some artistic quality that 24 fps motion pictures capture. To combat this some video devices mock 24 frames per second, by recording whole frames top to bottom (known as progressive), while not quite the same as film's pure 24 pictures per second, it looks visually similar. HD TVs and computer monitors can display this among other whole frame rates. Some say HD has met film in visual quality, some can still tell the difference.
THAT’S THE VISUAL SIDE. The key is, beyond resolution much has to do with personal taste. It's hard to exactly replicate film look with video, sometimes impossible. Likewise, making film look like video is pretty much futile. BUT, embracing a medium and then doing everything to place interesting subjects in front of the camera, knowing your tools and how they work, and taking care of the materials that hold the images will insure that what you have in mind will come through as clear as possible.
Is there any way to overcome these differences?
Despite a general animosity between the mediums, they can be converted back and forth. Telecine is the term for a process in which a film image is “scanned” into an electronic form and becomes video. Commonly a piece of film is projected into what is basically a video camera (or the chip that captures images, anyway), where the original 24 frames are chopped up and interlaced to match the 29.97 frames per second on TVs. This is how feature films get on VHS tape or DVD. Optical printing is light-projecting a video signal onto frames of film. This is how computer special effects and CG movies like Toy Story get on film to project in a theater. It does the best it can to convert ~60 half-frames per second into 24 whole frames, through a process of breaking those interlaced frames back into two separate images and cutting those 30 whole pictures down to 24. So while there are technical differences between the mediums, the fact is, they both involve series of images recorded, stored and played back.
Now you know something about current motion image mediums, advantages and disadvantages, and way in which technology have brought the two closer.
The next step will get you totally prepared to buy that one key piece of technology to get started making video...