Digital Video Camera Notes

Camera availability:
Cameras can be checked out for use during lab hours—check outside lockup for hours

Tapes:
Buy a minidv tape from the school store, any 60 min one is fine

Battery
Make sure it is full—look at icon on screen to make sure
If not, return to cage for another

Inserting mini-DV tape
Press the eject button to open the video tape compartment. The compartment door is usually connected to a motor, so don't open or close it manually. Let the motor do the work. Orient the video cassette correctly and drop it into the compartment, then carefully push the compartment closed. Don't force the cassette in if it won't go in easily. If the cassette is backwards or upside-down, it won't fit in the slot.
Once you've recorded some video on a tape and you don't plan to record anything more on it, you can lock the tape to avoid recording over it. To do that look for the tiny white tab on the side of the tape and slide it over to lock.

Shooting:
On most cameras there's a power dial button - usually on the back of the camera - that you use to select:
0. Camera - to record video
0. VTR - to playback video you've already recorded, or to capture it into a computer using video editing software. When you set the camera to VTR a display should light up on the top of the camera with touch-screen buttons you can push to rewind, fast-forward, play and stop the tape.
Off - to turn the camera off and preserve your battery
press and hold down the red record button, usually on or near the power switch, to begin recording.

Zooming:
Most digital video cameras have a rocker switch button you can press to zoom in for a close up shot or zoom out for a wide-angle view.
Experiment with the zoom button before you start filming. Depending on the camera, you can usually zoom in and out with varying speeds, and this takes a little practice to master!
When you zoom, you change the focal length of the lens. Back before zoom lenses, cinematographers used lenses of a fixed focal length. If they wanted a tight shot while the camera was rolling, they had to move the camera on a dolly, adjusting the focus as they went.
Focal length is the distance in millimeters between the optical center of the lens and the face of the charge-coupled device (CCD). The longer the distance, the tighter the shot; the shorter the distance, the wider the shot. A zoom lens that has a focal length from 4.3mm to 43mm is a 10-to-1 zoom lens, or 10X. A typical consumer zoom lens has a range of 16X. Many camcorders are advertised as having ranges of 48X or 72X. To get these ranges, a camcorder digitally zooms in to the video image after the optical lens has reached its upper limit. Digital zooming is similar to enlarging an image on your computer. If taken too far, image quality suffers. A typical zoom lens should be sufficient for most of your needs without having to resort to this digital range.

Focus:
Digital video cameras have a built-in automatic focus feature, and most of them are good enough for doing the vast majority of your shooing.
Still, it is good to learn how to focus the camera manually for those occasions when you'll need it. And if your career plans include being a cameraperson on documentary or feature films, manual focus is the industry standard.
Manual focus is good to use when:
0. You are shooting extremely busy or cluttered scenes where auto focus may keep changing and you instead want to remain focused on a particular object.
0. You are pointing at an object in the foreground and you really want the background in sharp focus with the foreground object somewhat blurred. Since the auto focus will keep the foreground image in focus, you'll need to switch to manual focus for a shot like this.
To switch to manual focus, look for the focus button and switch it from Auto to Manual.
Then adjust the focus by turning the large focus ring on the lens toward the front of the camera.

Exposure and Light
Digital video cameras have built-in automatic exposure, or iris, which is pretty good for most purposes. You usually can just depend on the auto exposure to give you the best lighting (although just as with manual focus, if your career goal is to be a professional cameraperson, it’s in your interest to learn how to do manual exposure).
Exceptions to just using auto exposure are if there's very little light and you need to open up the iris on the camera to let in the maximum amount of light, or if the background is too bright (called back lighting), and you need to close the iris to reduce the amount of light.
To manually adjust the exposure, look for the exposure switch button, which usually has three settings:
0. Auto - for automatic exposure
0. Manual - to adjust the exposure manually
0. Hold - to hold the manual adjustment you've made while you shoot your video
Set the button to Manual, then adjust the exposure to the level you desire.

White Balance
White balance has to do with differences in color caused by the intensity or "temperature" of the light and how the camera compensates for these differences in color. Sunlight is rarely pure white, but rather takes on different shades, such as a yellow or red tinge at sunrise and sunset, or a blue tinge in a shaded area.
Digital video cameras come with an automatic white balance meter that essentially tells the camera which intensity of the color white is in the picture, and the rest of the colors in the spectrum are adjusted accordingly to make the video look as natural as possible.
But there are cases where a video camera may misconstrue the intensity of the lighting because it is measuring the general intensity of the light it sees through the lens rather than the intensity of the light at the location of the subject of your shot. The result is either a blue or orange tone that makes your entire video tinted the wrong color.
For example, if your camera is in bright light, but the subject of your shot is in the shade, the camera will be reading the light as more yellow in tone, because the camera is in yellowish sunlight. The subject of your shot thus will come out looking slightly blue, because they are actually lit by bluish shade light.
To fix this problem, you should hold up a piece of white paper next to the subject of your shot, and then zoom the camera in on that white paper. Then push or select the white balance button on your camera to set the proper white balance at the position of your subject.
The camera essentially is forced to look at a true white color at that point, and then balance the rest of the color spectrum around that true white that it sees.