Oh, that was me, daddy.

That was probably the most entertaining thing I have seen in months. :)


Before they demo'd my neighbor’s house, which was one of the first places built here in PGI, we were allowed to go in and take whatever we wanted. I found two 8mm film cameras from the early 60's, and also a shoulder-mount tube VHS camcorder. The battery is dead, and I couldn’t find the charger cables or anything… but an interesting, if extremely ugly relic none the less.

It will be a long cutaway but none the less ...<grin> What I mean is there is no reason the camera the audience sees them using has to be the camera that actually shoots the footage that becomes their movie. There's no way for the audience to know where the footage they "shot" actually originated so the camera the audience sees them using on the screen can actually be a non-functioning prop as long as the image it supposedly is producing is dirtied up to look authentic. If you want the authentic look of VHS, use a bi-directional capture card like a Canopus 110 and in post take your DV footage, make an analog dub to a VHS recorder then capture it back again to DV.

Nice job on the prequel <g>.

There's no need to degrade in post, if you shoot VHS with an SVHS camera (it will be a true VHS recording, with approx 240 lines of resolution - it will look plenty awful! - you could always play it back 40 or 50 times before capturing too, just to give it a really vintage look.)

Regarding real cam vs prop cam--that's a good point, but I was still going to try to use a VHS cam to shoot it to get the look. I will likely by a prop cam just to show, however, no matter what I use.

I guess if I can find something that works that's cheap enough I'll buy it ( I don\'t wanna rent \'cause I want time to play with it at my leisure and make sure audio, etc. works right.

If it ends up being to expensive, I might as well just use the XL1s and degrade by copying back and forth. It works fine. I\'d also be more confident in the quality I was getting during the shoot. I don\'t wanna take chances with the audio.

So, thanks.

And thanks for the compliments too.

I would recommend shooting as you normally do in your cam, and then transfer it to a vhs tape using analog output, like the composite out. Then you can re-record it back into your NLE from the vhs tape using the composite input of the cam in AV>DV mode. This would probably be a pretty effective and quick way of achieving the limited scope of the vhs look without having to process it over and over again to degrade the signal - my thinking would be that the more you try to \'fake\' it by processing/degrading it in post the more it will begin to look \'animated\' as opposed to just low-quality.
-Jon

Yeah, that\'s what I did last time.

I have an old cvl325 magnavox vhs camera that I bought on a lark just as a relic, it works fine except for the dead battery, but I looked up batteries online and they are only 20-25 dollars. It looks fairly \'pro\' for an old camcorder -- it\'s a big shoulder-mount style, and you can run it in manual if you want to. My wife about died when I brought it home, so she\'d probably love me if I sold it! Let me know -- philip@centerstreetproductions.com.