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Video production has been an interest of mine ever since my folks let me tinker with their Sony CCD-V9 Handicam camcorder. I originally started tinkering with that camcorder to video my coin collection, but then got into stop motion animation with it as I found that while one couldn't take individual frames with it, one could take a burst of frames, then use the edit search feature to back the tape up. Quite an extremely tedious way to animate, but it kind of worked. After that I got a Connectix QuickCam and that had actual frame-by-frame capabilities, granted the image quality and grayscale only left much to be desired. Additional cameras came and went for animation and videography in general.

In high school it was quite fun using the video camera when possible for creative video projects for class. One of the most fun examples was for a literature class where we had to basically do a video project on a piece of classic literature. In our case it was The Scarlet Letter. We did The Scarlet Letter meets Jerry Springer. It was quite a riot!

In college at UW Madison I decided to major in Communication Arts - TV/Radio/Film. In the intro course we used the Canon XL1 to shoot projects. Though for my main class project I went back to using a QuickCam, as my project back then, in 2002, was to shoot a stop motion animation called Trouble! Quite a high screening that for class and then screening it in the Wisconsin Film Festival, with a packed theater laughing at and enjoying it! I also took a couple of advanced production courses while at UW. In advanced video production we graduated to super expensive Sony DSR series cameras. I forget the model exactly, but it was a beast of a camera and I want to say it was a five figures. Talk about being super nervous not to break it shooting projects! I recall one student dropped on and damaged the four figure lens! I shot a short "Kung Fu" student video in that class called Brutal Force. That too was a lot of fun, though I remember the principal days of shooting that being so exhausting and tense, as I only had the camera for a brief period and assembling a volunteer crew of friends and keeping them focused was also dicey. After that course I took an actual film production course. I think it was intro to film production, though it was a 600 level course. We shot in 16mm film. Our first film project was to shoot 50' of 16mm from on wind-up Bolex cameras. I screwed-up the color temperature on that project and got a horrible grade on that first project, but managed to get it in gear and get an A in that class.

Post college I started my own side business doing video production, though mostly video transfers of home videos to DVD and later Blu-ray. I ended-up dropping some serious scratch for Sony Vegas 5, as a serious NLE program. I later anted-up and upgraded to version 8 of Vegas Pro. Though some other NLEs I had used up until that point included Pinnacle Studio, VirtualDub, and DDClip. I found the Pinnacle software and the video capture card with it to be very glitchy, having issues with dropped frames. VirtualDub is great software for the basics and special purposes. DDClip was also nice software at the time for NLE.

I also later got into 8mm and Super-8 film transferring. My grandpa had a bunch of film reels he shot between the late 50s and early 80s that I wanted to get transferred. I sat on that footage for quite a while before actually getting the expensive gear needed to transfer them, a proper, high-def, frame-by-frame, telecine machine. At first I had eyed getting a MovieStuff telecine machine. I obsessed for quite a while on exactly what model to get and researching all that would be needed, PC hardware wise, to get the proper capture results. Those weren't cheap at the time, and still aren't cheap units. Alas, I also heard good things about Tobin Cinema System telecine gear. I ended-up buying a telecine machine prototype from TCS, which I still use today for doing 8mm and Super-8 film transfers. It's a very cool device! It's basically an old film projector that has been modified to do frame-by-frame capture using a pro-grade machine vision CCD camera. It captures via USB to my video production system. Once I capture the footage I use VirtualDub to duplicate frames accordingly to convert 16fps or 18fps to 23.976fps or 29.97fps for finishing on DVD or Blu-ray.

Other equipment I use for video transfers include a Canopus ADVC110 for capturing composite and s-video sources to DV for transferring to DVD or Blu-ray. I also have a JVC HR-S3800U for doing VHS transfers, plus a couple of Video8/Hi8 camcorders I use for transferring 8mm video.

Video cameras I use include a couple of Canon VIXIA HF-series cameras, the HF100 and HF200. Both of those can shoot in full HD and I haven't yet felt the need to delve into 4K video yet. They're both old cameras now, though I think they still work decently. I honestly haven't used them too much lately. When I have shot with the HF100 I have liked shooting in 24p, though it requires performing inverse telecine to get the progressive 23.976fps frames, which is kind of a task. Some other cameras I like using are my GoPro HERO4 Session and various Raspberry Pi cameras for time lapse videography. The GoPro HERO4 Session is quite handy for shooting POV videos to show something off from the first person view or to shoot instructional videos. I recently used it to shoot an instructional video on how to use a LulzBot TAZ PRO 3D printer at my day job.

Created by Mike Young on March 11, 2022. Last updated on April 10, 2022.