Over the next few articles I will give you a little background in how I got to where I am today.
I have never wanted to be “Trendy” in the video business. Even at college I pushed the primitive equipment to the max. At a TV station I modified stuff to work better for me and I used a consumer camera with a 3/4 inch video deck with out telling the engineers. It passed broadcast. I put a 400mm Nikkor on my JVC KY-2000 so I could record President Reagan getting out of his helicopter at his ranch in Santa Barbara 6 months before the national networks did it. After working for the TV station, I moved to Los Angeles to freelance. In the Los Angeles area we never got permits to shoot. We like to be stealth and work without a large crew. I did Pete Ellis Dodge spot with me and the director. (One of them made it into a tv inthe movie “Into The Night.” Occasionally we rent sound stages for bigger shoots but still a small crew. I was one of the first to do a “making of” documentary on a feature film as a one man band with a JVC KY1900 and a 3/4 inch portable video deck. I have always looked at way to “do it better.”
After I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I was one of the first in the area to purchase a Sony Betacam camera because it was one of the first “camcorders” because I did not have to rely on a separate video recording deck. I had adopted the camcorder before the local TV stations had used them. Once I rented a Schwen Gyro-Zoom for my Betacam so I could shoot from a helicopter because it was one of the first lenses with optical image stabilization (O.I.S.). When Sony put O.I.S. in their TR-100 Hi8, I also used Hi8 professionally because the cameras were so small. OIS made a small camera hand holdable.
Then the Sony DCR-VX1000 MiniDV camcorder came out and I was in “Nirvana.” Immediately I bought one because it offered what I had always wanted. A very high quality camera in a small lightweight package. It offered 3 chip component video in an optical image stabilized camera that weighed 3 vs 30 pounds. It cost $4,000 vs $30,000. Like “Duh.” This made a lot of sense. The camera was immediately back ordered for 9 months so my camera had a lot of use because it was rented. I kept that camera for 10 years.
One of the other areas where I was an early adopter was non-linear editing. While owning my beloved VX1000, I built a non-linear video editing system for $15,000 (most systems then cost $60,000 and up) in 1995 long before most people had abandoned tape. I used a Macintosh 9500 with a Targa 2000 board and Adobe Premiere 6.0 and a $4,700 8 gig disk-array. I remember at the Media 100 booth at NAB where they said that “Premiere never stays in sync.” I never had a problem and where are they now? The next revolution was FireWire. It allowed lossless dubbing and transfer. My footage was transferred for edit for the first time without loss.
Do you still have your JVC KY-1900 3-Tube Color Video Camera? I am trying to track one down, or somethign similar. Any advise on where or how to get one? many thanks!
Abigail
No, I have the habit to sell equipment that I don’t use to fund the new stuff, so that old camera is long gone.
eBay is the best resource for anything old.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/JVC-KY-1900CH-Studio-Camera-Fully-Working-/380453912493?pt=Camcorders_Professional_Video_Cameras&hash=item5894d1ffad
Alan