Get out Those Camcorders--Make That Movie!

Summer is the time for people to stop putting off making that movie they’ve always been talking about.

As I’ve mentioned in various columns over the past half-dozen years, making a movie is not particularly difficult but it can be extremely time-consuming, as students in the UND moviemaking workshops and production classes soon discover. This makes it most practical to shoot your personal movie projects during vacation periods, especially nights and weekends when potential cast and crew members might be more likely to be available. Things will go much more smoothly if time is calculated and planned well in advance so that everyone can arrange their schedules to complete the project.

A good estimate for production time is that it will probably take an hour or two to shoot the footage required for every minute of the final movie, and an equal time to edit it. Although these times can vary in either direction depending upon the advance preparation and complexity of a production, this means a five to fifteen-minute movie can often be shot over one weekend and edited the following weekend. A full-length feature will take a couple of weeks of intense shooting every day (40-60 hours per week), or can be spread out over a couple of months of weekends.

As recently as a decade ago, making movies required not only a massive time commitment, but a substantial financial investment. The cost of film and equipment made moviemaking an impossible dream for most people until the introduction of cheap digital camcorders and faster, less-expensive personal computers right around the turn of this millennium. Tastes in movies naturally vary, but now any people who see some movie, whether Hollywood or independent, and dare to complain that they could make a better one, had better be prepared to back up their assertion by doing just that.

Almost any recent computer and camcorder can be used to make a movie. However, the convenience, speed, and ease to do it with an image quality people now expect from DVDs (rather than fuzzy U-tube uploads) can be drastically affected by what sort of camcorder and computer one uses. As often as not, you get what you pay for, but you also have to know just what it is you’re getting.

These days consumer electronics departments seem to be pushing dozens of different camcorders from under $100 up to maybe $1000, with a variety of different features and a proliferating variety of recording formats. People who shoot only occasional home movies, and who plan merely to watch them on TV rather than editing them into more professional looking presentations, will probably be satisfied with just about any of the cameras out there. These people may prefer those that record directly to miniature DVDs that will play in standard DVD players, or the cameras that record to internal hard drives or memory sticks, that can then be transferred to a computer for burning to DVD.

Anyone who wants to do any serious moviemaking, shooting scenes that will later be edited into a short or feature-length movie, should avoid these camcorders, especially the all-automatic ones with no provision for manual override on exposure and focus. Although they may sacrifice a bit of convenience in some respects, camcorders using the proven digital tape formats of MiniDV and Digital 8, and with manual exposure and focus options, are still the most cost-effective and reliable ways to get a good quality picture in the world of standard definition video.

Blu-Ray DVDs have finally been established over the HD-DVD format, but it is still too early to predict what will be the standard in the gradually increasing market for so-called “high-definition” home video recording. Blu-Ray burners are still extremely expensive, and the blank discs are over $10 each. Unless you can afford a major computer upgrade, it’s best to stick with standard DV for at least the next couple of years.

Right now camcorder brands are starting to jump on the bandwagon offering low-cost consumer models in the new “AVC-HD” format, using mpg4 compression in an H.264 standard. However, they carefully avoid mentioning that the slightly more expensive HDV camcorders (which use a slightly older mpg2 format) currently provide both better quality images and more easily edited data. More editing software currently supports HDV than AVCHD, and real-time editing can be done on slower computers with HDV than with AVCHD.

Still far too expensive for consumers is Panasonic’s superior DVC-ProHD format.

Sony and Canon make the most popular HDV camcorders, which are also capable of recording standard miniDV.

Any of these high-definition formats requires a much faster computer with much more memory than is necessary for the standard-definition DV files recorded on MiniDV or Digital 8 tapes. The AVCHD format, especially, requires the most powerful computer you can find, and its heavily compressed signal may look great when playing back the original files on an HDTV, but will show visible degradation once you start applying any digital effects during editing.