Eye of the Camera

Should you notice a sudden drop in my posting/internet activity then let me fill you in on why that is. At the moment I am moving. Moving what? Moving house. It’s a lot of hard work, lot of paperwork, lot of hauling things around and I have to do all that while going to school normally.

Yesterday I finally received the keys to my new place and with that starts a short period of time where a lot of work needs to be done. I will be doing to big move on December 8, so that’s a mere 6 days from now. In the meantime my girlfriend and I will have to place 6 ceiling lights and paint two rooms while still needing time to wrap things up in the old house AND having to go to work and school. To be honest I still have no idea how we’re going to pull it off but pull it off we shall. I was hoping school wouldn’t take a real hit under the strain of moving but unfortunatly it seems I have to skip a few lessons here and there to make sure the new house is ready in time.

Camera Stuff

In today’s AV lessons we learned the complicated machine that is a professional camera. Before you even start using the camera to record something there are a number of things to take note off:

• Setting up the tripod (if needed) and making sure it’s secure.
• Checking the battery.
• Checking the tape.
• Checking the view finder.
• Checking the TCG.

When using a tripod for recordings of interviews or other shots it’s important that the tripod is standing solid on the ground so it doesn’t fall over. Just as important is that the camera is firmly secured on the tripod, wouldn’t want an expensive piece of equipment like that hitting the floor. Finally it’s important that all rotational axis are secured until the camera is secured on top of the tripod. After the camera is in place, you can losen the axis bolts and pan or tilt the camera any way you want.

The camera won’t work without a battery to power it, so checking if it’s charged is among the first things you should check before getting to work. Most battery’s have a little button on the side which activated a number of LEDs showing how much juice is left in the battery. If only normal battery’s had systems like that.

Since you rarely use these kind of camera’s for live broadcasts, checking if there is a tape present is probably a good idea.

The view finder is the little monitor inside the camera which displays the image you’re recording. Checking if it’s working is obvious, but with professional camera’s you’ll want to check if the color balance, or in this case the black/white balance is good. Using a built in gadget called ‘color bars’ you check if white is truely white, black is truely black and everything inbetween is grey. By doing this you ensure that the view finder displays the true picture. Should the view finder be set too light or dark then you could be tricked into thinking that you need to mess around with the lighting settings on the camera, resulting in a final product that’s either over- or under-lit.

The TCG stands for Time Code Generator, this is what stamps the time code on the tape. It generates hours, minutes, seconds and frames. The frame number is generated to identify specific frames in every second, which makes editing a lot easier. Since there are normaly 25 frames every second of tape, one could refer to “Frame 13 at 1 minute, 45 seconds”. Frames are recounted for every second, so the frame counter will never exceed 25. The TCG is also able to start from a preset time, say 1 hour. Should a 1 hour tape run full, you can grab a new one and tell the TCG to start counting forward from the 1 hour mark, thus continueing from the previous tape.

That’s today’s AV lesson summed up in a few paragraphs. I’m actually surprised I managed to remember all that with the added stress of house moving. Hope it was an interesting read!

Robin

Meer over dit onderwerp:

1. Camera Exam
2. Building The Stage
3. Noise!
4. Working in the Theater
5. Extension Cables… From Hell!