Videography With ILCs

Photography has been a popular hobby for more than a century.

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A lesser-known companion pastime was home movie making (or cinematography), using film that was 8 mm or 16 mm in width. The resulting film was displayed on a screen (or even a wall) using a projector. Just as electronics and later digital technology transformed photography beyond all imagination, home cinematography too went through a revolution. The interesting point here is that changes in this area occurred even earlier. The reason for this is obvious. Movie making is essentially capturing motion and showing it. That is exactly what TV broadcasting does. TV capture (almost) from the inception was electronic in nature, and this technology trickled down to home cinematography rather quickly. If that is cinematography, what is video? This, as per Wikipedia, is “using an electronic medium to record, copy, playback, broadcast and display moving visual media”.

Home movie cameras that used film were superseded by video cameras which recorded electronically but not digitally. Here, recording was done on magnetic tape spooled in cassettes (Picture 1), similar to audio cassettes using analog technology. Examples of this are VHS (by JVC, Panasonic and others) and Betamax (by Sony). There were other formats too. Analog recording method did not last long and was quickly replaced by digital technology where all data is recorded and stored using a stream of 0s and 1s. The result is that the captured video is a computer readable file that can be processed in myriad ways. This is the current technology. Amateur video cameras are also popularly called Handycams, though in reality this is a Sony brand name. The display part too underwent a drastic change. Gone are the projectors which were a pain to set up as the video captured can be shown on a TV that every home has.