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Oh My!
Brad Simon

This article first appeared in Bench Magazine http://www.BenchMagazine.com

Part 2

Video Camera

First of all you need a camera and tripod. You want it to look professional and not like it was filmed by a kid in school in their dorm room, so forget about a web cam. What you need is a digital camcorder. Do NOT buy one that records to a small DVD. These are worthless for even the simplest of editing that we will be doing. There are two types of camcorders that will work for our needs and each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Mini DV tape

Video tape has long been the industry standard in movies and television and will still be around for a long while. For camcorders the mini DV tape is the standard. The advantage to using this type of camcorder is that the tapes are small and easy to store. Once you have filmed a project and copied the footage to your computer you can easily store the original tape and still have the original tape for back-up purposes.

Also while you are filming, if the tape gets full, you can insert a new tape and keep on filming. The disadvantage of a mini DV tape camcorder is that in order to copy the footage to your computer you must plug your camcorder to your computer and play it in real time. So 1 hour of footage will take 1 hour to copy to your computer.

Hard Drive

A hard drive camcorder has a hard drive built into it just like your computer and the video footage is recorded directly to it. The advantage is that once you have recorded something you can plug your camera into your computer and just copy the file from one hard drive to the other in just a few minutes.

The disadvantage is that while you are filming if your hard drive fills up you have to stop filming and move all of the files from the camera to your computer before you can continue shooting again. Also the file you move is the only copy of what you shot. Once you are done editing it you will want to save the original file as well as the new edited version. Video files are huge and this can fill up a hard drive quickly.

My preference is to use a mini DV camcorder to film larger projects such as setting a stone or fabrication of a piece of jewelry where I want to keep the original footage. For smaller project such as shooting a quick ad, I prefer the hard drive camcorder as once I’m done editing it I don’t need the original footage and the hard drive camera saves time copying the file to my computer.

The built-in microphones, even in the most expensive camcorders, are not that great so you want a camcorder with an external microphone jack. Then go down to Radio Shack and buy a clip on microphone for around $20. Clip this onto your shop apron and plug it into the microphone jack on the camera and you will be amazed how much better your sound will be.

Video Editing

Next we need to edit our video. The computer you have is more than adequate. The computer you use to collect e-mail on is more powerful than the computers George Lucas used to create the first Star War movie or Steven Spielberg used on ET. We’re not out to create the next Hollywood blockbuster, so don’t worry about having to buy a new computer as what you have will be just fine.

However what you do need is some video editing software. Your camcorder probably came with some editing software that will accomplish some simple edits but I recommend Adobe Vlog It.

This software will not only do the simple editing of your video or create a slide show of your still pictures; it will also out put the video in a compressed format needed for putting on the Internet and will even up-load it for you. Priced at $29.95 this is the best value in editing software available anywhere. At our website http://www.Internet4Jewelers.com, in the resource section, we have a link to where you can buy this software and we have some free video tutorials on how to use it.