Tapes Offer Clear Instruction For Producing Your Own Videos
Shooting a video is both childishly easy and frustratingly difficult. The easy part consists of pushing the right buttons, which is simple enough thanks to sophisticated camcorder design and improvements in automatic functions.
The difficult part is everything that precedes the shoot - the planning and preparation - and everything that follows it - the editing.
The manuals packaged with camcorders concentrate on the easy part, telling you which buttons to push and when. All the difficult stuff, however, is up to you to learn from your own study and experience.
Sadly, many camcorder owners never take up the challenge of mastering this next level.
An attempt to guide users painlessly along the path of improvement has recently been issued in video-cassette form by Videomaker magazine, a publication for camcorder enthusiasts. Videomaker editors and contributors are featured in two tapes, “Basic Shooting” (47 minutes) and “Video Editing” (42 minutes), priced at $10.95 each.
The tapes are an inconsistent combination of valuable professional know-how and occasionally amateurish presentation.
The virtue is that quite a lot of ground is covered, with eight topics per tape, ranging from camcorder shopping and proper lighting to editing hookups and special-effects generators. The main drawback is that the pieces were produced as distinct segments for a Videomaker cable TV show and hence adhere to rigid time constraints, so the most complex material is given no more time than the most elementary.
When the topics are simple, the tapes are at their best, as when technical editor Loren Alldrin, the most frequently seen presenter, discusses the differences between the most basic camcorder models and one of the most advanced, or when audio writer Larry Lehrfeld shows the limitations of the built-in microphone and points out the advantages of other types.
Both of these segments, as well as a very good one about how to get steady shots without a tripod, were produced “in the field” and use clear demonstrations to make their points.
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