Suggestion for digital camcorder for snowboard movies....

[Cjunky]

ok i want to make some snoboarding/extreme
sports movies with some friends of mine.
Some of them are profesionals so i would like
the quality to be of pretty good quality, in the hopes of producing a movie that could eventually be sold.

Iam on a budget of around 800 dollars, i could spend more but would like not to.

I know i want to go digital because of the smaller size than of digital 8.

I have narrowed my selection down to
eather the panasonic line of camera's
or the jvc line..due to the price..any other suggestions?

the jvc 805 or the 505 depending on real difference in quality. The panasonic would be the pv-100, pc-200, or pv-400...hat is the differene..

I have heard that the panasonics have bad low light quality.
This matters to me because of low light conditions on the mountain. I also want to video tape "night" time activites, such as a
kegger or something.

well if any of you experts have any advice it would be apprecieated.

Thank you

Matt

[This_Idiot]

Hi Matt,

You're taking on one of the most difficult sets of extreme circumstances possible for camerawork, and it's gonna take a LOT of practice to hone your art !

In mechanical terms you immediately have the problem of condensation as soon as you take your cam from home/warm car into a freezing environment. Then you'll have the problem that most battery packs aren't designed for low temperatures either, so will have considerably lower recording times than in an ambient temperature. Keeping the cam/battery warm would help out here but could induce the condensation mentioned above.

Then you have the major problem of trying to get a decent exposure against a snow background. Although most modern cams have presets to compensate for backlighting, these may not be enough for this particular task, so you will need to learn how to operate the cam in manual mode.

On night shots, you only have two choices. Either good artificial lighting, or using a cam that is capable of IR (such as many of the Sony's).

There's no doubt that if you are thinking of using the cam professionally (IE trying to make money from it) then you would be better off buying a 3 CCD cam, but this certainly won't fall within your budget. Alternatively, buying a budget camcorder and doing some serious research on camerawork, starting with reading the manual and practicing at every opportunity may be your only choice. Ask others that are filming on the slopes (especially those that seem to be getting good results). Join a local club, or contact a local education centre for night classes.

Hope this helps

Chris

[Elie]

I agree with Chris, you really can't do it with low end stuff, unless you want to stage the shots instead of just hit record and go down a hill.

However, there is a solution that I've used on the race track (bare with me here) it's expensive but prooved to be invaluble so here it is..
Buy yourself a Sony GV_D300 it's a compact mini DV VCR from Sony, the good thing about that is you can mount an external lens with a 3 foot wire and mount it anywhere you want, in our case the helmet, in yours.. maybe your hat for example.
So now all you do is hit record on the Sony and away you go, it'll be under your coat, protected from the elements, and the lense peep hole is no larger that 1cm squared.
If you want audio, easy..hookup a mic somewhere in your jacket and voala.
The good thing about the lens if you mount it on your hat is, anywhere you look, you'll automatically point your head to that location and you'll get the shot, also the head provides alot of stability as well, just like shock obsorbers

Expensive, yet very practicle for that type of event I would say.

Regards,
Elie


[This message has been edited by Elie (edited 26 December 2000).]

[mynx]

Also note that electronics start to fail at 32 deg F. This is worse if any condensation forms the tape will be eaten and heads can actually be ripped off. Also sunlight reflecting off of the snow can burn the CCD if it sits still too long. It doesn't take long.

[Brian Ellis]

Chris

I hate to contradict you but condensation is a problem only when going from cold to hot and humid, not the other way round. When your car steams up, it's because there is excessive humidity inside (eg wearing wet clothes) and the windscreen is cooling down. OK. But a camera doesn't have wet clothes inside and, even if it happened, the condensation would be on the outer shell, nowhere near the works or detector. I've often had condensation problems, but only when going out of an airconned place (cool) into humid, hot areas, notably in the tropical rain forest. I've never experienced it when in any of the Swiss ski resorts (I used to live there). Where you are likely to have condensation problems is when you come in out of the cold to a heated environment if the aircon/central heating has humidification. IMHO, the best way of handling this is to remove the battery, tape and leave the camera open for at least 30 mins or so as you go indoors. If the interior is humidified, then you can avoid any unlikely but putative problems by simply putting the tape in after you are outdoors.

To put it technically, condensation occurs on a part only when its surface is under the dew point. If it is warmer than ambient, this is not possible, even in a mist, because the dew point is always under the ambient temperature.

A different problem may be due to the tape becoming stiff. The tape substrate is usually a pretensioned polyethylene teraphthalate and, below about -10°C, it starts getting quite stiff. This makes it a lot more difficult to pull it into intimate contact with the head drum. If contact is lost, you may start getting anomalies in the image (total loss in ultra-cold conditions) and the main drive motor will take a helluva lot more out of the battery, shortening the battery life even farther. Also, lubrication of the head motor will be stiffer with a similar effect. Pros often use camera muffs under these conditions and I believe some are even heated for Arctic use. Oh!, and 60 min tapes have a thinner substrate than 30 minute ones, so will behave better in cold temperatures.

Also, keep the lens clean from wind-blown or snowboard-lifted snow!

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Brian (the terrible)

[This message has been edited by Brian Ellis (edited 27 December 2000).]

[This_Idiot]

Thanks for the correction Brian.

I think the other stuff is still relevant though ? Can you shed any light on these points since you've experienced these conditions ? As I've often pointed out, I'm a lousy cameraman myself....

Cheers

Chris

[Biker]

Hi Cjunky, Glad Brian corrected the condensation thing, i was beginning to think my memory was failing. Biggest problem i have found in snow is the massive contrast thing.

There is a tendancy for snow to be 'whited out' IE. no form at all, just a sheet of white, or all the skiers to be formless black silhouettes. If it is sunny and the skiers where very bright light colours this is improved greatly.

We all starp Camcorders to our helmets for filming off road motorcycling - set on wide angle. It works great - no visible shakes and the action looks intense.

Tip - crash on the opposite side to the camera.

Best of luck.


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[Elie]

Biker, I think both the circular polorizer and a UV filter will do the job just well, you can even add a nutural desity filter to decrease the amount of light reflecting of the snow into your camera. Filters do miracles and they are not that expensive.
For outdoor shooting I always have the polorizer and the UV handy just in case.

Regards,
Elie

[Brian Ellis]

When I was doing 35 mm slides of snow scenes, I used to use Kodachrome Professional which was balanced for tungsten light with a speed of ASA 40, with a daylight balancing filter, which reduced the effective speed to ASA 25, the same speed as regular daylight Kodachrome. This had the advantage of much more effectively reducing the bluish cast from excessive UV going through the lens than the regular with a UV filter. I also did the same thing with Super-8 (where the Kodachrome was automatically artificial-light type and the conversion filter was built into the camera).

I have not tried the same thing with video but I imagine that setting it to artifical light balance, with a conversion filter, may also make a similar improvement. It may be worth the try and it may avoid an ND filter.

To avoid saturation, using one of the cameras with a "zebra" over-exposure warning may be helpful. The problem is that the gamma of ordinary camcorders is not adjustable and is rather limited. If you avoid over-exposing snow highlights, then the shadow side of e.g. dark tree trunks or clothing may be too dark. However, if you reduce the contrast when capturing into the computer, there is a remarkable amount of extra detail that can be found in the shadows. My guess is that this may be very camera-dependent, so I suggest you do some dummy runs under different conditions, using different exposure levels (assuming your camera has independent "shutter" and iris controls), as well as the auto-exposure and then adjust the capture parameters on playback to obtain the best compromise. This is especially important if you go above 2,500 or 3,000 m on a clear day, where the sky may vary from near white to a dark blue, depending on the angle between the lens axis and the direction of the sun. Also, remember that, at these altitudes, the UV is really intense and this is where the orangey daylight to tungsten conversion filter is really effective. Bad for the skin, too

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Brian (the terrible)

[Biker]

Hi Elie - thanks for tip. You know I tried filters before on My early VHS video cams and because the whole lens barrel turned with focusing, i found that circular polarisers and the 'top/bottom' split filters were none to effective. I tried making some of my own from sunglasses using gradual tints. These did not show up the lens rotating too badly and help limit 'sky' brightness, but lost image quality a little, probably due to poor (read cheap) sunglass lens material (i did not fancy buying a dear pair to cut up on the garage grinder! - think divorce here!!!).

But do you know, - i had not thought to try filters again with the new DV cam, - AND it does NOT have a rotating lens assembly - yippee!!! Thanks for the reminder guys.

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