You know you’re in the presence of truly visionary camera work when you don’t notice it. Recently this happened to me while watching a movie I’ve seen many times. A movie not noted for it’s cinematography or ingenious composition: “The Birdcage.” The shot opens o

Q. In Videomaker’s June 1995 issue, the article “Every Few Thousand Miles” warned against using alcohol as a cleaning fluid for cleaning video heads. I have twice over the years read in your publication that one should use 99% Isopropyl alcohol because it’s pure. What’

There’s no doubt about it; videotape is slowly (but surely) becoming THE medium of choice for saving cherished personal images. Film, slide and print-to-video transfers are very popular these days, and there’s good reason why: they’re convenient! Instead of finding –thena ha

Music video. Those words alone often conjure up images of over-moussed hair, gorgeous dancers, too-tight clothing and dizzying camera moves. It’s a realm of professional video production that can make or break careers–in front of and behind the camera. Take, for example, David Fincher.

Whether you’re recording your daughter’s wedding or shooting tape of your mule ride to the bottom of the Grand Canyon — if the aim of your video is to say “This is what happened,” it’s part of a tradition as old as the invention of the motion picture itself: the

You’re about to take part in the world’s shortest psychological test. Ready? All right, then. Please note your reaction to the following word: tripod. Now check your response against the results of our nationwide scientific survey: I wonder what’s new on the mail order pages: 4

Industry Watch Version 2.5 of Apple‘s Quicktime multimedia architecture will support the increasingly popular Motion-JPEG video CODEC. This will allow video editors and others involved in the creative process to view M-JPEG compressed files on any Power Macintosh with no additional hardware re

Whether you tape them for fun or profit, reunions offer video opportunities second only to weddings. What kinds of reunions? Well, high school and college, of course, and family reunions too. But just about any organization that existed 25 years ago or earlier is liable to dust off an old class lis

Visionaries? Prophets? Geniuses? Or just people who happened to be in the right place at the right time? Whatever you call them, the pioneers of the consumer video industry have changed the way we make video. They’ve brought us VHS, low-cost video editors, desktop video and a whole catalog of

You’ve just been asked to produce a short video training program that will be distributed on CD-ROM. Or a multimedia publisher has hired you to shoot video footage for a new computer game. Or maybe you’d just like to digitize some of your home videos for personal use. Whatever the case,

Would you like to shoot more video than you do? Could you use a bunch of ideas for satisfying programs that require very little time and effort? Then you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to lay out some fail-safe projects so simple that you can prep them in ten minutes, shoot the

"Hey, I just heard about a new three-letter acronym that’s supposed to revolutionize the whole videomaking world." "Oh. You mean VDT?" "Nope." "How about "HDTV?" "That’s four letters." &quo

Of the seven deadly camera sins that I denounce so sternly from this pulpit, “upstanding” may be one of the harder to eliminate. Upstanding is the act of videotaping everything from standing eye-level, and it’s a tough habit to break because standing is what you’re usually do

There’s no doubt about it–the good old days of linear editing are numbered. Digital video is like a bullet train hurtling down the track, closing in quickly on the complacent caboose of analog video. But don’t toss out your analog equipment just yet. The digital technology that i

Video editing pioneers didn’t have the simple pleasures we take for granted today. As you may already know, they didn’t have things like time code, computer-based editors or Video Toasters. But did you know they also didn’t have electronic editing, audio dubbing or even slow and f

Are you familiar with the term “frequently asked questions?” Well, it’s a bit more Internet jargon we all need to swallow. When you first join “newsgroups” or “visit” “sites” you should first find their lists of “frequently asked questions

Easy Prompter If you have the Videonics TM-2000 CG (character generator) or any CG like it, you can use it as a video prompter. Just write your dialog and store it as a scroll in your CG. Then hook up the CG to a monitor and place the monitor just under your camcorder where the talent can see it. F

Every time you point your camcorder and push the record button, you’re recording history. Seriously. Even though you may think it’s just another birthday video full of screaming children, there’s more to it than that. You are (perhaps unwittingly) helping to document the age in wh

It’s hard to imagine a camcorder without some kind of viewfinder. Some low-cost, no-frill camcorders come equipped with a simple optical viewfinder, which functions like the peephole on a snapshot camera. You observe your intended scene through an opening or frame, sometimes with the aid of a