Camcorder

New Formats:. Subsequent installations of a chandelier may require extensive renovations. The following list covers consumer equipment only!. This reinforcement can typically only be done at the time of the installation of the box. Aftermath of this, "I tried to make a gag called "An octopus appears in a miniskirt" (Mini ni Tako ga Dekiru, ミニにタコができる)" he explained when he was asked why he had done it by media reporters. Instead they specify that the electrical box be specially reinforced. For the most famous example, the unbelievable incident that Japanese television performer Masashi Tashiro was caught for taking a sneak shot of a woman's skirt in a station occurred. Many do not require special supports and can be directly attached to the electrical box like any other fixture.

Camcorders can be used for voyeurism. Some may require special attachments to the ceiling and specially reinforced ceilings. There are even examples of Hollywood movies shot entirely on consumer camcorder equipment (see Blair Witch Project.). Structurally, chandeliers may be much heavier than other ceiling light fixtures. Camcorders are often used in the production of low-budget TV shows, where the production crew does not have access to more professional equipment. More complex and elaborate forms of chandelier continued to developed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries until the widespread introduction of first gas then electrical lighting devalued this traditional form of lighting's appeal. The film can be used to spot and pick out troublemakers, who can then be prosecuted in court. The light-scattering properties of this highly refractive glass quickly became a popular addition to the form, leading to the Crystal Chandelier.

The police use camcorders to film riots, protests and the crowds at sporting events. Developments in glassmaking in the 18th century allowed the cheaper production of lead crystal. Activist videos often appear on Indymedia. By the early 18th century, ornate cast brass forms with long, curved arms and many candles could be found in the homes of most of the merchant classes. Greenpeace uses camcorders to film their activities. The fixture's popularity as a status symbol continued to grow. If the police do use violence there will be evidence on video. From the 15th century, more complex forms of chandeliers based on ring or crown designs began to become popular decorative features, found in palaces and the homes of the very wealthy.

Anti-globalization protestors film the police to deter police brutality. They generally took the form of a wooden cross with a number of spikes on which candles could be secured, the whole assembly being hoisted to a suitable height on a rope suspended from a hook once lit. Anti-hunting protestors film fox hunts. The earliest chandeliers were used in medieval churches and abbeys to efficiently illuminate large halls. Animal rights protestors who break into factory farms and animal testing labs use camcorders to film the conditions the animals are living in. Modern chandeliers are often very ornate, containing dozens of lamps and complex arrays of glass shapes to scatter light in complex, attractive patterns. Political protestors have capitalized on the value of media coverage use camcorders to film things they believe to be unjust. A chandelier is a ceiling-mounted fixture with two or more arms bearing lights.

Home video is usually done with poor filming techniques. For casual use, camcorders often cover weddings, birthdays, graduation ceremonies, and many other personal events. Scheduled events such as official press conferences, where a video infrastructure is readily available or can be feasibly deployed in advance, are still covered by studio-type video cameras (tethered to "production trucks."). Subsequently, the video is transmitted electronically to a studio/production center for broadcast.

In locations away from a distribution infrastructure, camcorders are invaluable for initial video acquisition. Camcorders have found use in nearly all corners of electronic media, from electronic news organizations to TV/current-affairs productions. Nonetheless, these new addon-functions can be used to shoot short fun clips at parties, where quality of the recording is not an issue. Also there is no way to zoom slowly.

While digicams have optical zooming in principle, it is often disabled during filming because depending on the optics, adapting the focus while zooming may not be perfect so the captured video may not always stay sharp during zooming. This means their use is either limited to capturing short clips in poor quality, lack good zooming ability and every device which is limited to flash memory for recording and does not use DVD, Harddisk or Tape as recording media cannot store enough data to capture longer periods of PAL/NTSC-qualitiy video. Mobile phones are not as advanced in video-gathering as digicams and employ even stronger compression, resulting in less quality and/or use lower frame rates. As of 2006, many recent digicams can record short movie clips with a resolution of 640x480 and 30 frames per second (either using MJPEG or MPEG-4, but the recording time is either very short (few minutes) and/or the compression artifacts are very visible.

Video-capture capability is now available in selected models of cellphones, digicams, and other portable consumer electronic devices such as media players, but due to compression artifacts caused by high compression ratios, their output quality is not comparable to the output quality of dedicated camcorders. Camcorders which record directly on DVD media are also on the rise. In terms of sales, Digital8 and miniDV recorders dominate most first-world markets. As of 2006, analog camcorders are not marketed anymore.

Many consumer camcorders bundle a light version (with limited features.). A contemporary Personal Computer of even modest power can perform digital video editing with low-cost editing software. Before the 21st century, consumer video editing was a difficult task requiring a minimum of two recorders. When dimly-lit areas are brightened in-camera or in post-production, considerable noise distracts the viewer.

For the sophisticated hobbyist (prosumer), high-end units offer improved optical and video performance through multi-CCD components and name-brand optics, manual control of camera exposure, and more, but even consumer camcorders which are sold for $1000 such as the Panasonic GS400 are not well-suited for recording in dim light. For the beginner, entry-level camcorders offer basic recording and playback capability. Consumer units offer a plethora of I/O options (IEEE 1394/Firewire, USB 2.0, Composite and S-Video), but lack basic manual settings for video exposure. Manual controls need space, either in menus or as buttons and make the use more complicated, which goes against the requirement of ease of use.

Thus, consumer camorders are unable to shoot useful footage in dim light. For example, good low-light capabilities require large capturing chips, which affects price and size. As the mainstream consumer market favors ease of use, portability, and price, consumer camcorder emphasize these features more than raw technical performance. Time in post-production (editing) to select and cut the best shots for nice viewing is measured in days or weeks.

The transfer is done at normal speed, so the complete transfer of a 60 minute tape needs one hour to transfer and about 14GB disk space for the raw footage only - exclusive any space needed for editing. All other digital consumer camcorders record in DV format on tape and transfer its content over FireWire (some also use USB 2.0) to a computer, where the huge files (1GB for 4 to 4.6 minutes in PAL/NTSC resolutions) can to be edited, converted, (and with many camcorders) also played back to tape. Some recent camcorders record video on flash memory devices (in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4), Microdrives, small hard disks or size-reduced DVD-RAM or DVD-Rs in MPEG-2 format - but due to the limited size of the recording medium, their uninterrupted recording time is limited. No data from a block on the tape means a block artifact which is visible in the picture, but they can be interpolated from surrounding data like it happens in CD-Players when a read error occurs.

This leads to one of the most significant disadvantages of digital recording - that minor disc errors can lead to corruption of the entire disc. Either a certain block of digital data on the tape is readable or not, which means all or nothing. Analog tapes lose quality slowly over time, "snow" becomes visible, while this does not happen with digital tapes. (Please see the video page for details.) The imager-chip is considered an analog component, so the digital namesake is in reference to the camcorder's processing and recording of the video.

Newer camcorders include Digital8, miniDV, DVD, and solid-state (flash) semiconductor memory, which all record video in digital form. Camcorders are often classified by their storage device: VHS, Betamax, Video8 are examples of older, videotape-based camcorders which record video in analog form. All but the most primitive camcorders imanginable also need to have a recorder-controlling section which allows the user to control the camcorder, switch the recorder into playback mode for reviewing the recorded footage and an image control section which controls exposure, focus and white-balance. The third section, the recorder, is responsible for writing the video-signal onto a recording medium (such as magnetic videotape.) The record function involves many signal-processing steps, and historically, the recording-process introduced some distortion and noise into the stored video, such that playback of the stored-signal may not retain the same characteristics/detail as the live video feed.

In modern (digital) camcorders, an analog-to-digital (ADC) converter digitizes the imager (analog) waveform output into a discrete digital-video signal. After scan-out is complete, the photosites are reset to start the exposure-process for the next video frame. At the end of the timed exposure, the imager converts the accumulated charge into a continuous analog voltage at the imager's output terminals. The light exposure is converted into electrical charge.

The camera lens projects an image onto the imager surface, exposing the photosensitive array to light. The imager converts light into an electronic video-signal through an elaborate electronic process. The imager section is the eye of the camcorder, housing a photosensitive device(s). Professional units offer direct user control of all major optical functions (aperture, shutter-speed, focus, etc.).

The optic lens is the first component in the camera-section's "light-path." The camcorder's optics generally have one or more of the following adjustments: aperture (to control the amount of light), zoom (to control the field-of-view), and shutter speed (to capture continuous motion.) In consumer units, these adjustments are automatically controlled by the camcorder's electronics, generally to maintain constant exposure onto the imager. More commonly, the optics and imager are referred to as the camera section. Finally, the recorder encodes the video signal into a storable form. The imager (usually a CCD (charge-coupled device) or CMOS sensor IC on modern camcorders; earlier examples often used vidicon tubes) converts incident light into an electrical (video) signal.

The lens gathers and focuses light on the imager. Camcorders contain 3 major components: lens, imager, and recorder. As of 2006, an entry-level MiniDV camcorder fits in the palm of a person's hand, at a price under $300 US dollars. When camcorders were first introduced, they were bulky shoulder-operated luggables that cost over $1,500 US dollars.

The evolution of the camcorder has seen the growth of the camcorder market as price reductions and size reductions make the technology more accessible to a wider audience. The digital nature of miniDV also improved audio and video quality over the best of the analog consumer camcorders (SVHS-C, Hi8.) Variations on the digital-video camcorder included the Digital8 camcorder, and the DVD camcorder. Its cassette media was even smaller than 8mm media, allowing another size reduction of the tape transport assembly. In the late 1990s, the camcorder reached the digital era with the introduction of miniDV.

Among the mass consumer market, camcorders gradually replaced still cameras for vacation and travel use. Throughout the 1990s, camcorder sales had the unintended side-effect of hurting the still camera photography market. Eventually the only major manufacturers marketing VHS-C were JVC and Panasonic, so the format fell into obsolescence. During the 1990s, the UK market saw Video8 and Hi8 eat into VHS-C/S-VHS-C sales as manufacturers such as Sharp Corporation dropped their VHS-C models in favour of 8mm.

Equally important, entry-level VHS-C camcorders were priced less than 8mm units. But some casual and family users preferred VHS-C because of its shared lineage (and familiarity) with VHS. Serious amateur-videographers preferred 8mm, simply because it was better suited (than VHS/VHS-C) for the task of video production. The complete dominance of VHS among TV-timeshifters and rental-audiences guaranteed VHS-C an uneasy coexistence alongside 8mm.

In most cases, viewers would connect the camcorder to their home VCR, and copy their recordings on to a VHS tape. On the down side, since the 8mm format was incompatible with VHS, 8mm recordings could not be played in VHS VCRs. On the plus side, the 8mm camcorder generally produced higher quality recordings than a VHS/VHS-C camcorder, and the standard 8mm cassette could record up to two hours. 8mm video represented a trade-off for the consumer.

were even smaller than VHS-C cassettes. 8mm video used a tape whose width is 33% less than VHS/Betamax tape (~12.7mm), allowing even further miniaturization in the recorder's tape-transport assembly and cassette media. The HandyCam could be held and operated entirely within the palm of the operator's hand, made possible by the 8mm video format. A year later Sony introduced the first HandyCam camcorder.

VHS-C allowed manufacturers to reduce the weight and size of VHS-derived camcorders, although at the expense of recording time. The VHS-C cassette held enough tape to record 30 minutes of VHS video, while a mechanical adapter enabled playback of VHS-C videocassettes in standard (full-size) VHS VCRs. VHS-C was essentially VHS with a reduced-size cassette. Within a few short years, manufacturers introduced two new tape formats tailored to the application of portable-video: the VHS-C format and the competing 8mm.

(Most camcorders were designed for right-handed operation, though a few possessed ambidextrous ergonomics.). These camcorders were large devices that required a sturdy tripod or strong shoulders to stably support the camera's bulk. The first camcorders combined the video-camera with an existing full-size VHS/Betamax recorder. In 1983, Sony introduced the first camcorder, followed by Kodak in 1984.

While the camera itself could be quite compact, the fact that a separate VCR had to be carried made on-location shooting a two-person job. The cassette unit could be detached and carried with the user for video recording. The portable VCR consisted of the cassette player/recorder unit, and a television tuner unit. Specialized models of both the camera and VCR were used for mobile work.

Prior to the introduction of the camcorder, portable video-recording required two separate devices: a video-camera and a VCR. As technology advanced, miniaturization eventually enabled the construction of portable video-cameras and portable video-recorders. Cameras found in television broadcast centers were extremely large, mounted on special trolleys, and wired to remote recorders located in separate rooms. Video cameras were originally designed for broadcasting television images--see television camera.

. This compares to previous technology where they would be separate. The camcorder contains both camera and recorder in one unit, hence its portmanteau name.
A camcorder is a portable electronic device (generally a digital camera) for recording video images and audio onto a storage device.