Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

As I prepare for my Christmas break, I am surprised at the number of teachers who drop by to ask my opinion about purchasing cameras for Christmas. So I have responded with the following information. Of course I am by no means an expert, so if you have knowledge above and beyond what I have to share, please feel free to comment, and I’ll pass on your tips.

Teachers, Several of you have inquired about cameras to purchase for Christmas.

VIDEO:

The flip cameras offer fine video quality for small home projects or taping kids in class, but not for LONGER projects. They are reasonably priced too, ranging from $125-$160. If you are considering one, I would ask the sales person to demonstrate getting video off the camera and judging the quality for your self. You might not be so impressed when you see the quality—I like to call it YouTube quality. But it’s decent enough.

There are many brands and types of video camera. I myself have been questioning whether a “hard drive” camera was a worthy investment. This website will talk about all the various types of cameras available to help you make a knowledgeable decision (even though it appears to be an instructional type site.) I confirmed what I had heard a good while back about the hard drive cameras, in that the video is not in a format that most “editors” can handle, and so must be converted first, which may degrade the quality of the film. If you don’t intend to edit any video, this is a fine purchase. These cameras have upwards of 30 to fifty gigabytes, and you will pay a pretty penny for them, anywhere from $450-$1000.

If I were buying a video camera, I would purchase one that takes mini-dv tapes. They are the least expensive for the QUALITY you get. The video file is in a format that can be recognized by most video editors, including the industry standard Apple program Final Cut Pro all the way down to the freebie on your Windows XP workstation (Windows Movie Maker) (NOTE: ALL the school videos shown on the news program have been created here at school with Windows moviemaker—and they were taped using a Sony mini-dv camera.) Yes, you’ll have to buy mini-dv tapes, but for the quality and considering most of us are “novice” videographers, you will be pleased as punch with this or other similar video cameras.

Another note about the mini-dv cameras—they will take still photos too, but check to make sure you are getting 3mp or higher. 2mp or less will not offer the quality to print out.

STILL PICTURE CAMERAS:

Still Image cameras—most of us want a point and shoot camera, as we are not necessarily interested in professional cameras that have lots of bells and whistles. There are many of these in the stores right now too. If you are considering a santa gift in the guise of a digital camera, Santa should look for this:

1) optical/digital zoom: You want the optical zoom to be higher than 3X. I typically disregard how high the digital zoom is, since all it does is crop and pixellate pictures—they will print out looking fuzzy and unfocused—that’s what the digital zoom does. Also, if you plan to use the digital zoom, get a tripod, because it is virtually impossible to be still enough to take pictures using digital zoom—no matter how still you think you are, camera shake will effect the pix –remember you breathe, therefore the camera will detect even this slightest movement.

2) Pixels. Get at least 3 –and in the stores right now, you almost cannot find a digital camera that does not at least have 5 megapixels. 3MP will print out great 8X10 pictures to frame and display. Also know that downloading the pictures from these cameras will require lots of memory, and you can absolutely fill up your harddrive with useless photos you will never use. Consider JUST downloading the ones that are good enough, or get an external drive (there are 160GB external harddrives for as low as $79, and they resemble an ipod. Small, portable. Cool.

3) LCD Display - if you have older eyes, you will want a fairly large LCD display. Many people don’t even look through the viewfinder anymore, but instead rely on the LCD Display to frame up a shot. You want menus to have readability too, so having a bigger LCD screen will help.

4) Memory cards. Cameras have almost stopped making the smaller ones, and lately the smallest I’ve seen is 512 mb, which translates to roughly 400 average pictures. WOW. (Remember you can fill up your harddrive—can anyone spell c-r-a-s-h?) Most memory cards available are now upwards of 1-2gb. 1600 pictures. Don’t forget you could crash your computer b/c you want to keep all those photos. If you like all your photos, get an external drive. Save pix to it.

If you want a quick and dirty tutorial on using your video camera or still camera, I don’t profess to know all, but I can offer some tips that will make you happier with your final product. Let me know.

Image Attributions:

Image: ‘untitled‘
www.flickr.com/photos/51035715376@N01/270680726

Image: ‘Anyone Have a Flip Video Camera?‘
www.flickr.com/photos/99291169@N00/2120710374

Image: ‘WD-H43 .7x wide angle lens‘
www.flickr.com/photos/86533050@N00/1342274233

Today I posted a video some sixth grade students made for a spot on our news program. One of my loyal readers wanted to know how it was done, so this post is an attempt to tell how the video was made. We did not use any really expensive equipment to make that video. The library has a Sony DV Handycam camcorder that was used by the kids to take video. I told them not to worry about the sounds, noises, or talking, as in all likelihood we would remove it and use our own voice over narrations. So I got a locker key from the office, and they got the camera and we went looking for lockers to shoot.

Once we had our footage, we came back to the library, and they set up my Dell laptop. Using a Compaq firewire card we connected the camera to the computer and turned it on. Almost immediately the computer asked if we wanted to capture the footage. I made the girls direct it to my external harddrive (notice the duct tape holding it together–i dropped it about a year ago!! It still works thankfully!) I learned sometime ago that if video was captured to a basic computer it may skip as the computer’s basic memory is not fast enough to handle video. (I had an entire Christmas program from school that skipped like crazy, and lots of disappointed parents.) I also don’t want to fill up my harddrive with a bunch of videos. So I sought out an expert–the video editor from my church, and he recommended an external hard drive that had 200GB of memory and a 7200 spin rate to keep video from skipping. I now have two of these, both four or five years old, which are great, b/c now all pictures and video go there.

Anyway, once we got our film on the computer, we used a very basic editor–the freebie Windows Movie Maker. The girls imported the video, and then we cut out and snipped unnecessary footage. I wanted them to cut more, but they were very protective of the video.

I had them create a cover or opening, and they used PowerPoint that was saved as an image. Pretty basic. Then they wanted to do their audio voice over. WMM allows you to, so they began by planning what to say. Before videoing, they had already written out a plan of what to get–lockers that were not closed right, lockers with things blocking the frames that might cause jams, and messy lockers. They had already selected the messy locker, and they decided to clean it out for the video too. That was cute. The guy who owned the locker kept asking if anyone saw anyone around his locker. They didn’t tell until he saw his locker on the show. They also told me his locker is already messy and full of clothes again.

Anyway, they did their audio narration section by section (as the clips imported were in pieces–every time the camera was stopped and started clips were created, so there were many.) They would mute the existing audio, and record their own.

They ran into a problem when they wanted to add transitions, as the narration would not align, so they only used one transition–a flip or rotate at the point where they cleaned out the locker. If one looks closely, it is in the wrong place, but they were pleased as punch with it.

I told them their video could NOT go more than 3 minutes, so they did not get to put any credits on (other than “the end”). Oh did they fuss. But they did not want to get rid of any footage, and we were at the end of their class, so they decided on just a quick “the end.” We used a CHEAP headset w/ a microphone to record it. They saved it as a movie file (.wmv in moviemaker) and then watched it again. They wanted music, so we looked in freeplaymusic.com for some. I finally had to lay down the law, as they didn’t have time to search– that would have taken a whole day again, and so I convinced them to use something I had already used for another project. So they re-imported their video w/out music in WMM, and added the song twice with a slight overlap at the end of the first time and the beginning of the second. The music was 90 seconds, so two times through was just enough. They saved it as a movie file, and that was the final project, which we played out during the news program the next day. The whole project took two days–one day to shoot and capture, and then one day to edit and finalize. (They are w/ me for 45 minutes each day.)

Our studio has a pc/tv converter, so inserting the wmv into a ppt slide allowed us t0 share it schoolwide.

These girls are already planning their next one, which will center on lost and found stuff. They are in the planning stages of a puppet show type video, where the clothes talk to each other asking where their owners are. Should be cute–IF they can pull it off.

Now that I’ve told you how it was done, I want to say that our studio has a fancy, expensive video editor, but my goal was to let the girls see that one does not have to use fancy expensive equipment to make videos. I think they got it too. They are all jazzed about the lost and found clothes puppet show. I also know that this could have been done using a 2.0 USB wire instead of a firewire, and that using a Mac would have been just as easy (but our school does not use Mac.) Even better, the new flip cameras make it even easier to capture video.