Using the Digital Camcorder

You will need to supply a few items for your use of the camcorder.

	AAA batteries, for the external clip-on microphone.
	Walkman-type headphones, to check your sound while recording.
	Extra Sony MiniDV tapes.

The tapes require a little explanation. Not all tapes are equal. Different manufacturers use different lubricants inside the tape cassettes, and when the lubricants mix they can gum up the camcorders - and ruin your video. The worst offender seems to be FujiFilm. We insist on Sony tapes to help ensure the quality of your video, and also because Sony makes the camcorder, so we know they've been tested with it.

You will need to return the camcorder with two Sony MiniDV tapes in the case. We supply the camcorders with two Sony MiniDV tapes - if you want to keep the tapes you use, simply replace them. You may want to purchase extra tapes as well, especially if you are going abroad. Tapes are available at Ritz Camera (318 S. State), Big George's (2019 W. Stadium), and Best Buy (3100 Lohr Road).

Also inside the camcorder case is a small brochure that describes the camcorder parts, do’s and don’ts, basic camcorder functions, and tips and tricks to improve your video. We’ve also prepared an x-minute video that covers how the camcorder’s parts and use. We strongly recommend reading the brochure, watching the video, and practicing with the camcorder, to prepare you for your first shoot!

NOTE: To view the following video, you will need a high speed internet connection (LAN, DSL or cable modem), and Windows Media Player 9. To test your connection and player, you can visit our Streaming Media Library page, and use the Test Your Connection links in the blue sidebar.

	Camcorder Orientation Video
	Camcorder Brochure (Acrobat PDF)

Creating a Video Storyboard

A storyboard serves the same function that an outline serves for a term paper. It’s a draft document that roughs out the structure of the story you want to tell, and lets you plan the video you shoot to support the story. It can be created in Word, as a table with multiple columns.

	Sample Storyboard (Acrobat PDF)
	Blank Storyboard (Right-click the link and select Save Target As...)

A good storyboard is your best friend in the field. You can start laying it out before you record a single clip. As you refine your ideas, and as you shoot video and see where your story leads you, keep updating the storyboard, and add in specific clip information. This has three major benefits.

	You can create a more coherent, more powerful video.
	You can identify and capture additional shots you need while you’re still in the field, even as the story changes and develops.
	You will save hours and hours of seat time when you get to editing, especially if you log your tapes and include the tape references in a separate column.

For planning purposes, thirty seconds to two minutes of video is typically enough for a clip inserted into a PowerPoint for illustration. For a case video, 5-12 minutes is usually sufficient, depending on your topic.

For a documentary case video, it also helps to think about your video like a paper, with defined sections.

	Intro – What's the context of the situation? What’s the big question / problem? Why should your audience care? Show the big picture, and why it matters.
	Body – What actions are being taken, given the context you supplied in the intro? What is the impact of these actions? Show examples, give detail.
	Conclusion – What are the results? What's expected in the future? Summarize and show future directions, if appropriate.

Logging Your Video Tapes

We recommend carrying a little pocket notebook in the field, to note the subject, start time, and end time of each clip as you record. Using the camcorder's VTR mode, you can play back your video, and jot down rough times for each clip. As you refine your storyboard in the field, you can "audition" and select clips you are likely to use, then transfer the clip information into the storyboard. This saves you lots of editing time; when you get to the workstation, you'll quickly find and transfer the clips you want to use.

  Sample Tape Log

Creating Good Interview Segments

First off, read the brochure that comes with the camcorder. It has extensive tips for how to prepare your speaker for taping, and techniques for shooting good video.

Whenever possible, use both the tripod and the lavaliere microphone for interviews. These two things are the best way to make sure your video looks and sounds professional. For "on the street" interviews, they aren't as important, but for seated interviews, they are a must.

For interviewing, it is highly recommended that you record using only the camcorder’s battery, not using power from a wall socket. The quality of electrical power can vary dramatically; computers and other equipment can create static and other “noise” in the power current. The camcorders don’t have a lot of ability to filter this out, and it can ruin the audio portion of your video. So charge your camcorder's battery before you interview, and recharge it during breaks, if you can.

Use headphones to check the audio quality as you tape. If the camcorder isn't plugged into the wall, and you're still getting static in the audio, change the microphone's AAA battery, and check to see that the microphone cord isn't draped over an electric cord.

In most cases, it's better to have the speaker focus their visual attention on the person asking questions, rather than the camcorder. One technique is to shoot the video from a position behind and almost "over the shoulder" of the interviewer, but you can shoot at a broader angle, too.

Long interviews by themselves can get a little dry…so think about “cutting away”, an editing technique where you let the speaker keep talking while showing just the video portion from a different clip. This can have three advantages:

	It helps illustrate what the speaker is talking about.
	It lets you gracefully assemble segments of a longer interview in a way that makes the most sense for your story, rather than in the linear order a speaker talked about them.
	It lets you "mix and match" between multiple takes of an interview (say, the first part of Take One and the last of Take Three), if a speaker stumbles over a word, or phrases the answer better on a different take.

Right after you finish an interview is the ideal time to think about what segments you might use for this technique, and whether you’ll need to get additional shots to supplement your storyboard plan.

Recording Voiceovers for Video

The best way is to use the camcorder and the supplied lavaliere microphone, and record the voiceover as video. After you transfer the video to the workstation’s hard drive and import it, you can throw away the video portion and keep just the audio.

	Find a quiet space with a door you can close (perhaps a study room?) for your recording, away from fans and other sources of noise. If possible, use the same space for all your voiceover recording.
	Script out what you want to say; practice saying it, so your tone is natural; and move the paper pages quietly as you record it.
	Don’t worry about getting it all in one take. You can cut and mix different portions of different takes, as long as the way you speak is roughly the same.
	Try to be consistent with the volume and tone of your voice. Mornings are usually better for recording; late night isn’t the best, tiredness can come through in the recording.
	Have some water handy, to keep your mouth and throat moist.

Using Other Video Sources in My Project

All this training assumes that you are working mostly with video you shot yourself, and that you'll transfer to the workstations using the techniques we describe in the training. This means we assume the bulk of your material is on MiniDV tapes that conform to the NTSC DV video standard; 720 by 480 pixels big, and 29.97 frames per second.

However, this may not be the whole picture. Perhaps a company wants to give you promotional or supplemental video they've already shot, to include in your project, or you have some interesting video from other sources. The bad news is that it's a wild, wooly world of video formats and standards out there...

	The video may be on any number of tape formats (including VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Hi-8, Betacam (Beta), Digital Beta (DigiBeta), DVCPro, DVCAM, Digital-S, U-Matic 1/4 inch). Depending on where in the world they were shot, they could also conform to different video standards (PAL, SECAM).
	The video might already be converted to computer formats (Windows Media Video, QuickTime, RealMedia, MPEG1, 2, or 4) at any number of sizes and frame rates, or even to distribution-only formats on disk (VideoCD, SuperVideoCD, or DVD) that are especially hard to edit.

We bring this up at this point, because there are some tradeoffs to plan for...

	It's alright to blend DV-quality video with some lower quality video, but the general rule is to start as high up the quality ladder as you can, to ensure a quality final product.
	Depending on format and standard of the video you get, you may have to pay for professional conversion to a format and standard you can use.

What To Ask For, If You Get The Chance

You may have to just accept what a company gives you, but it never hurts to ask. Some companies have an internal video production group, or they may be able to contact the vendor that provided the video. These are the three best options.

	Ask for NTSC MiniDV copies (or dubs) made from professional quality source tapes. Typical formats for professional tapes include Betacam (Beta), Digital Beta (DigiBeta), DVCPro, DVCam, and Digital-S.
	Ask for NTSC VHS dubs from the professional quality source tapes. The quality will be noticably poorer than your MiniDV footage, but you can transfer these directly to the workstations, without professional conversion.
	Ask for dubs of the professional quality source tapes themselves. You will have to pay for professional conversion, but the quality will be comparable to the footage you shot yourself.

What To Do With What You Get

So, after you put down the aspirin bottle, what video can you use? Here's the rundown.

NTSC MiniDV and NTSC VHS Tapes
	No issues - the workstations are set up to use these, as is.
Other Types of Video Tapes
	If you have access to a camcorder or deck that's compatible with your tapes, you can use it to transfer the video to the workstation, which will automatically do the conversion to our standard format. We can loan you cables to connect your camcorder/deck to the workstation, if you need.
	You can take your tapes to a professional video house, and pay to have them converted. If the source tapes are of professional quality, get MiniDV dubs if you can, but in most cases a VHS dub will do.
Computer Video Formats If your video is already captured to a computer video file (QuickTime, .avi, .mpg), it may be usable, but in general we don't recommend using them for the bulk of your project.
	Computer video files are encoded into different formats using specific software widgets called codecs. Unfortunately, there are many different formats and codecs. If the workstation's editing software doesn't accept the format, or have the right codecs to play back and edit the video, it won't be usable.
	Codecs are also used to compress video, to reduce file size before distribution. DV standard video eats about 13GB per hour. If the computer video file was heavily compressed, say for web delivery, it'll have somewhere about 1/100th the data, and it'll look lousy once it's stretched to match NTSC DV video size and quality, then recompressed for delivery.
Distribution Video Formats If at all possible, avoid video in distribution formats. Non-commercial DVDs can work, but commercial movie DVDs have built-in copyright protections to prevent conversion, and may also be locked down by international region. Most other distribution formats, like Video CDs (commonly used in Asia and India), are so highly compressed, the quality will generally be worse than VHS. You can use Video CDs, but they will have to be professionally converted.

 

Knowing What Kind Of DVDs To Use In The Lab

As you perhaps know, there's a DVD format war going on, and it's not completely over. Here's a quick tour of the DVD format landscape, and our recommendation for what to use where.

Formats - Stamped vs. Burned

To start with, a DVD player uses a laser to read little indentations, or pits, that are aligned in grooves on the disk, and then translates that into the images and sound you see. There are two methods to create a DVD. One method uses a metal master to stamp the pits and grooves onto the DVD, the other uses a laser to burn them in. The stamping method is almost 100% reliable, but is very expensive (as of the summer of 2003, the lowest minimum order anyone would accept (300) cost about $1200 to produce).

For personal use, and short run production, DVD burning is far preferable. However, the mass market for consumer DVD burners, and the potential value of patents developed using slightly different technologies and approaches to burning DVDs, contributed to a certain reluctance for companies to cooperate and create a common burning standard.

Burned DVD Formats Are Not 100% Compatible!

At this point, there is not one standard disk burning format, but five: DVD-RAM, DVD-R (record-once), DVD-RW (rewritable), DVD+R (write-once), and DVD+RW (rewritable). None of these exactly match the common DVD reading standard: DVD-ROM (which, for all practical purposes, is the stamped method).

Every DVD player supports DVD-ROM, but which burned formats it also supports depends on the age of the player (newer is generally better), the player's tolerance for minor deviations from the DVD-ROM standard, and the burned format compatibilities the manufacturer intentionally built into the player. To make things worse, DVD-R/-RW disks are not very compatible with DVD+R/+RW players, and visa versa. Most computer manufacturers, and some stand-alone player manufacturers, have aligned themselves with either the -R/-RW or the +R/+RW camp.

DVD-RAM is almost an obsolete format, although some computers and stand-alones still use it. The lab workstations can't use these disks, coming or going, so if you have them, you'll have to convert them before use.

Input DVD Formats

The workstations are equipped with an internal burner that supports DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW. We used this multiformat burner in the workstations so that, if you have a DVD burner in your personal computer, it doesn't matter what flavor you have. You can transfer files in, or to save files out for backup and archive purposes.

Output DVD Formats

For distribution to other people, a different set of challenges have to be faced. If you want your video to be viewed on a DVD player as video, the files burned onto the DVD have to match an additional specification for format and layout, known as DVD-Video. Typically, this would require outputting your finished, edited video into a certain file format, using a separate DVD authoring software package to build a compliant disk image, then burning the image to a DVD.

Rather than force you to learn yet another skill, we added stand-alone DVD burners to the workstations. These can accept a video feed from the workstation, automatically convert it to the correct file formats and layout, and burn it straight to the DVD. There's a catch, however. These stand-alone burners only accept DVD-R and DVD-RW disks.

The Reason for DVD-R For Output...

We chose to support the DVD-R disk format for four reasons:

	In U.S. testing of stand-alone DVD players, the DVD-R format disks have consistently been more compatible overall than DVD+R (96.7% vs. 87.6%); both rewritable formats tested at about 87% compatible. The big edge was with older stand-alone players; with DVD-R you are less likely to get "we can't play your video" calls.
	In testing computer-based playback, the DVD-R and DVD+R are about even, in the 60-65% range.
	If you're shipping your project abroad, Japan and Europe have much lower DVD+R/+RW adoption rates than the United States. You're much better off with DVD-R.

You still may have compatibility issues. If the downside risk for your project's viewability is high, we recommend the following approaches.

	Use only name-brand DVD-R disks for distribution; don't use no-name-discount-bargain-bin disks. We recommend Pioneer; since they make the deck, you know their disks are compatible for burning. Playback testing of different brands of disks has also shown something else - compatibility improves if you don't go with the low bidder.
	If it isn't already on the DVD case, identify prominantly on the disk's label that it is a DVD-R, so viewers have a fighting chance of not sticking it into a DVD+R/+RW player to view it.
	Test the playback of your DVDs (and CDs, for that matter) before you go into that big presentation.
	Distribute both a DVD-R and a backup file in a different format. Windows Media Video or RealMedia Video files burned to CD-ROM can provide nearly as good a quality for computer playback. VHS tapes are nearly 100% compatible, with the caveat that VHS standards vary by country too; if you're going international, have the VHS tape professionally converted to the appropriate country format before you send it out.

Choosing Between Movie Maker and Premiere

We support two video editing programs, Adobe Premiere 6.5 and Windows Movie Maker 2. Movie Maker is much less complex than Premiere, so it’s easier to learn and use, but it’s also less flexible. Premiere is much more complex; it has a steeper learning curve, but you can create more sophisticated looking video.

Here are the criteria to consider, in using one tool or the other.

 

Plan the Next Steps

First you’ll need to reserve one of the Multimedia Workstations, using iMpact. They are available during the same hours the Computer Labs are open, and you can reserve them for three hours at a time. Go to the Student Room Reservation system.

You will need to bring any image files you want to use with you, on DVD/CD/Floppy/Digital memory cards - the workstations are not on the Internet or the main business school network.  You can check out portable Zip Drives from the Kresge Circulation Desk.

You'll need to provide your own headphones. To keep the noise level down, we only provide one set of computer speakers for the lab. The kind of headphones you might use with a MP3 player is fine. Each workstation is also set up to allow for two people to listen simultaneously, so you can edit in teams.