07-31-2006, 07:54 AM
If you want to make sexy videos for YouTube, Google, and other sites, you need to know a little bit about camcorders. Basically, a digital camcorder is going to come in 1-CCD (charge-coupled device) and 3-CCD models. The CCD is the thing that collects the light. The more you have, and the bigger they are, the better. The 3-CCD camcorders tend to be almost three times as expensive becuase the CCD is the most expensive and important component. The big advantage is they handle color much better since they split it into its RGB components, handling each color seperately. All the camcorders at Wal-mart have 1-CCD.
A second consideration is the format that you are using. Basically you can divide it into three groups based on data rate: 25Mbps, 50Mbps, 100 Mbps. All the cameras at Wal-mart will be 25Mbps. One of the things they do to conserve space is reduce the amount of color information in the picture. The human is more sensitive to light than color, so they can get away with it to a certain extent. It's called chroma subsampling, and your options are 4:1:1, 4:2:2, and 4:4:4 which is basically saying that Wal-mart camcorders have half the color information of TV camcorders which have half the color information of High Definition Camcorders.
The final consideration, for now, is lighting. ALL light has color. Sunlight is the closest to white, but it tends to look orangish in the evening (which is awesome for skintones!). But, if you mix lighting, such as tungsten light with sunlight, you are likely to get a nasty sour grape colored face.
Translation: The average consumer camcorder produces grayish skintones because the cheap camcorders cannot handle red very well, and all the colors tend to be undersaturated. You cannot tell by looking at them in the store, because much of this horror happens when the image is compressed to tape. Some manufacturers, like Sony, "aim" the color output toward good looking skintones. This is important to keep in mind if you plan on faking a Paris Hilton-style, copycat video. The problem is this produces a color-cast that affects other objects in your picture.
The solution, to a certain extent, is color-correction in post-production with Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, or even Photoshop. Another possibility is to plan for the color-problems like they did when they filmed the Wizard of Oz. They acutally ran tests to get Dorothy's dress to be the perfect shade of blue, even though (if I remember right) the acutal dress is more pinkish. They knew the Technicolor prrocess would through the color off in a certain direction by a certain amount, so the planned for it.
A second consideration is the format that you are using. Basically you can divide it into three groups based on data rate: 25Mbps, 50Mbps, 100 Mbps. All the cameras at Wal-mart will be 25Mbps. One of the things they do to conserve space is reduce the amount of color information in the picture. The human is more sensitive to light than color, so they can get away with it to a certain extent. It's called chroma subsampling, and your options are 4:1:1, 4:2:2, and 4:4:4 which is basically saying that Wal-mart camcorders have half the color information of TV camcorders which have half the color information of High Definition Camcorders.
The final consideration, for now, is lighting. ALL light has color. Sunlight is the closest to white, but it tends to look orangish in the evening (which is awesome for skintones!). But, if you mix lighting, such as tungsten light with sunlight, you are likely to get a nasty sour grape colored face.
Translation: The average consumer camcorder produces grayish skintones because the cheap camcorders cannot handle red very well, and all the colors tend to be undersaturated. You cannot tell by looking at them in the store, because much of this horror happens when the image is compressed to tape. Some manufacturers, like Sony, "aim" the color output toward good looking skintones. This is important to keep in mind if you plan on faking a Paris Hilton-style, copycat video. The problem is this produces a color-cast that affects other objects in your picture.
The solution, to a certain extent, is color-correction in post-production with Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, or even Photoshop. Another possibility is to plan for the color-problems like they did when they filmed the Wizard of Oz. They acutally ran tests to get Dorothy's dress to be the perfect shade of blue, even though (if I remember right) the acutal dress is more pinkish. They knew the Technicolor prrocess would through the color off in a certain direction by a certain amount, so the planned for it.