11+ hours of 1920×1080 recording in my hand.
Photo by D.W. Leitner

Last week Sony announced its first professional AVCHD camcorder line, NXCAM, at InterBEE in Japan. It’s not Sony’s first brush with AVCHD.

In 2006 Sony and Panasonic jointly announced the Advanced Video Codec High Definition standard for consumer camcorders recording 8 cm MiniDVD discs. Remember them? So three years ago!

Then, in late 2008, Sony introduced a professional POV camera system, HXR-MC1, adapted from a consumer AVCHD camcorder. (Read my review. My experiments mounting an MC1 camera head at the end of a K-Tek audio boom pole led to K-Tek’s design of an adapter for the MC1, demonstrated at NAB 2009.)

Before we go further, what exactly is AVCHD? Why another low-end HD format? more

Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2005) was “filmedâ€? with Canon EOS 1D Mark II DSLRs adapted to Nikon lenses, and edited on Final Cut Pro.

If you’re anywhere near New York City between November 22 and April 26, 2010, you’ll want to drop by the Museum of Modern Art and visit the marvelous Tim Burton exhibition opening next week. I attended the press preview, with Burton in attendance, in advance of the madding crowds.

It’s rare, if ever, that MoMA hosts a potential blockbuster of a show about a filmmaker, but Burton’s 27-year career spans fourteen live-action and animated films as director/producer and concept artist—and often illustrator, writer, and photographer too. more

Siemens star of Sharp Max seen through a Carl Zeiss 28mm DigiPrime in viewfinder of a Sony PMW-350.
Photo by D. W. Leitner

For projects requiring high shooting ratios in the early 1980s, you could shoot 16mm or try on for size one of those newfangled "camcorders" from Sony, Panasonic, or Bosch: Betacam, Recam, or Quartercam. (Mid-word capitalization arrived with the dot.com era a decade later.) The first two featured 1/2in. videotape cassettes, the last, 1/4in. (Ampex in the United States, original inventor of video recording, also proposed 1/4in. helical recording, but never became a player.)

Success of 1/4in. videotape, an idea ahead of its time, would await introduction of MiniDV in the late ’90s, but the 1/2in. videotape camcorder took off from the starting gate. (Would you believe "camcorder" had to be coined by a reviewer? David Lachenbruch, longtime editorial director of the newsletter Television Digest, also coined "consumer electronics." Anyone know who came up with "prosumer"?)

1/2in. videotape camcorders, epitomized by Betacam, are the reason many of us first encountered the eccentricities and shortcomings of video zooms designed for electronic newsgathering. (Who came up with ENG? Or EFP, electronic field production, for that matter?) more

Basilica, from New Work: Newark in 3D.

Stereoscopy, or 3D imaging, has been around as long as photography, at least since1840, when the English inventor Sir Charles Wheatstone, who first explained binocular vision, fashioned his original stereoscope for displaying photos in stereo pairs. Stereoscopes were widely popular, even common, throughout the second half of the 19th century, as evidenced by their easy availability at flea markets today. I have two wooden models from that era on my bookshelf.

By comparison, theatrical 3D movies enjoyed only two brief spikes of popularity, first in the early 1950s (Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder), then in the 1980s (Friday the 13th Part III, Jaws 3-D). Regarded as curiosities, they never achieved mainstream status, either with production crews, audiences, distributors, or exhibitors. Loading and equally exposing two strands of motion picture film was never a picnic, never mind the added interaxial and convergence lens issues unique to 3D. Dual-strip projection (in the ’50s) and funny glasses that induced headaches failed to endear the format to anyone.

But as virtually everyone attending movies today knows, 3D is experiencing a vigorous revival, propelled this time by digital technology. Compact HD cameras are easily mounted side-by-side at the human interocular distance of 55mm to 75mm (when appropriate to the image). For instance, you can strip down and slap together two Sony HDC-F950s as 3D innovator Vince Pace did for Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour and James Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar, or position a pair of Flip UltraHD cameras in your backyard, as you wish. more