Fear

I bought a new camera recently, the start of February. I have shot two weddings with it, on the 2nd and on the 15th.

It is called the Sony PMW-EX1 and it really is an impressive piece of kit.

The one difference with this camera is that it records onto Express Cards, which are a type of memory card. Why is this posting caller “Fear”?

Well,  I am used to shooting onto tape, and these original tapes would always be stored. With the new camera, the work flow is a little different. I just copy off the footage onto my hard drives, make backups of it and then wipe the cards to be used at the next wedding. If I had a wedding on the Friday and again on the following day, I would need to copy off the footage when I got home, and have them wiped for the next day.

After my first wedding with the camera back on the 2nd, I avoided wiping the cards until I really have to.

Basically, I was sitting outside the church yesterday, poised to wipe the cards. This is when the fear set in! Did I copy off all of the other wedding correctly? Even though I had double and triple checked what I was doing, that felling of fear and dread was amazing!

I suppose a small does of paranoia is a good thing!

Hi-Def (HD) in a nutshell…

You can’t go into a TV shop nowadays without being bombarded with Hi-Def televisions. How did we ever survive without them!

I believe though, that many people don’t know what Hi-Def really means, so let me explain.

Hi Def basically means that the picture you are seeing has a greater resolution and is in widescreen format.

What does greater resolution mean? Well in Standard definition (what we had all along), the resolution was 720*568. You can picture that your television screen is made up of rows and columns of dots, each with a different colour. So, standard definition had 720 columns of dots and 568 lines. Hi Definition has a few different flavours but I will talk about the one that will become the norm. It has a resolution of 1440*1080. This means 1440 columns and 1080 rows. This means that you have twice the number of rows and columns of dots than standard definition which means a much clearer picture with more detai.

What does widescreen mean? In the past most televisions were not widescreen, they had an aspect ratio of 4*3. This means that for every 4 dots across, there were 3 dots down. This means that the TV was nearly square. Widescreen television have an aspect ration of 16*9 which means that for ever 16 dots across, there are 9 dots down. It is a much more rectangular shape.

If you are watching a widescreen movie on an old style TV, you would see black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. This is because you are viewing a rectangular image on a square TV. If you have a widescreen TV this doesn’t happen, as the movie and TV have the same shape.

Older video cameras used to record in non-widescreen mode. They were designed for producing video to be played back on older televisions. You could switch many of these cameras into a widescreen mode but there was a sacrifice in quality.

Hi Def video cameras are designed to record in widescreen mode so you are getting more detail and a video that is designed to be played on your widescreen TV.

For a more detailed explanation, just go to…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi_def#Standard_resolutions