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Camcorder

A camcorder (video CAMera reCORDER) is an electronic device that combines a video camera and a video recorder into one unit. Equipment manufacturers do not seem to have strict guidelines for the term usage. Marketing materials may present a video recording device as a camcorder, but the delivery package would identify content as video camera recorder.

In order to differentiate a camcorder from other devices that are capable of recording video, like cell phones and compact digital cameras, a camcorder is generally identified as a portable device having video capture and recording as its primary function.

The earliest camcorders employed analog recording onto videotape. Since the 1990s digital recording has become the norm, but tape remained the primary recording media. Starting from early 2000s tape as storage media is being gradually replaced with tapeless solutions like optical disks, hard disk drives and flash memory.

All tape-based camcorders use removable media in form of video cassettes. Camcorders that do not use magnetic tape are often called tapeless camcorders and may use optical discs (removable), solid-state flash memory (removable or built-in) or a hard disk drive (removable or built-in).

Camcorders that permit using more than one type of media, like built-in hard disk drive and memory card, are often called hybrid camcorders.

History

Video cameras originally designed for television broadcast were large and heavy, mounted on special pedestals, and wired to remote recorders located in separate rooms.

As technology advanced, out-of-studio video recording was made possible by means of compact video cameras and portable video recorders. The recording unit could be detached from the camera and carried to a shooting location. While the camera itself could be quite compact, the fact that a separate recorder had to be carried along made on-location shooting a two-man job. Specialized video cassette recorders were introduced by both JVC (VHS) and Sony (Umatic & Betamax) to be used for mobile work. The advent of the portable recorders helped to eliminate the phrase "film at eleven" — rather than wait for the lengthy process of film developing, recorded video could be shown during the 6 o'clock news.

In 1982 Sony released the Betacam system. A part of this system was a single camera-recorder unit, which eliminated the cable between camera and recorder and dramatically improved the freedom of a cameraman. Betacam quickly became the standard for both news-gathering and in-studio video editing.

In 1983 Sony released the first consumer camcorder - the Betamovie BMC-100P. It used a Betamax cassette and could not be held with one hand, so it was typically resting on a shoulder. In the same year JVC released the first camcorder based on VHS-C format. In 1985 Sony came up with its own compact video cassette format — Video8. Both formats had their benefits and drawbacks, and neither won the format war.

In 1985, Panasonic, RCA, and Hitachi began producing camcorders that recorded to full-sized VHS cassette and offered up to 3 hours of record time. These shoulder mount camcorders found a niche with videophiles, industrial videographers, and college TV studios. Super VHS full-sized camcorders were released in 1987 which exceeded broadcast quality and provided an inexpensive way to collect news segments or videographies.

In 1986 Sony introduced the first digital video format, D1. Video was recorded in uncompressed form and required enormous bandwidth for its time. In 1992 Ampex used D1 form-factor to create DCT, the first digital video format that utilized data compression. The compression utilized discrete cosine transform algorithm, which is used in most modern commercial digital video formats.

In 1995 Sony, JVC, Panasonic and other video camera manufacturers launched DV. Its variant using a smaller MiniDV cassette quickly became a de-facto standard for home and semi-professional video production, for independent filmmaking and for citizen journalism.

In 2000 Panasonic launched DVCPRO HD, expanding DV codec to support high definition. The format was intended for use in professional camcorders and used full-size DVCPRO cassettes. In 2003 Sony, JVC, Canon and Sharp introduced HDV, the first truly affordable high definition video format, which used inexpensive MiniDV cassettes.

In 2003 Sony pioneered XDCAM, the first tapeless video format, which uses Professional Disc as recording media. Panasonic followed next year, offering P2 solid state memory cards as recording medium for DVCPRO HD video.

In 2006 Panasonic and Sony introduced AVCHD as an inexpensive consumer-grade tapeless high definition video format. Presently AVCHD camcorders are manufactured by Sony, Panasonic, Canon, JVC and Hitachi.

In 2007 Sony introduced XDCAM EX, which offers similar recording modes to XDCAM HD, but records on SxS memory cards.

With proliferation of file-based digital formats the relationship between recording media and recording format became weaker than ever: the same video can be recorded onto different media. With tapeless formats, recording media has become a storage device for digital files, signifying convergence of video and computer industries.

Overview

Camcorders contain 3 major components: lens, imager, and recorder. The lens gathers and focuses light on the imager. The imager (usually a CCD or CMOS sensor on modern camcorders; earlier examples often used vidicon tubes) converts incident light into an electrical signal. Finally, the recorder converts the electric signal into digital video and encodes it into a storable form. More commonly, the optics and imager are referred to as the camera section.

Lens

The lens is the first component in the light path. The camcorder's optics generally have one or more of the following adjustments:

aperture or iris to regulate the exposure and to control depth of field;
zoom to control the focal length and angle of view;
shutter speed to regulate the exposure and to maintain desired motion portrayal;
gain to amplify signal strength in low-light conditions;
neutral density filter to regulate the exposure.

In consumer units, the above adjustments are often automatically controlled by the camcorder's electronics, but can be adjusted manually if desired. Professional units offer direct user control of all major optical functions.

Imager

The imager converts light into electric signal. The camera lens projects an image onto the imager surface, exposing the photosensitive array to light. The light exposure is converted into electrical charge. At the end of the timed exposure, the imager converts the accumulated charge into a continuous analog voltage at the imager's output terminals. After scan-out is complete, the photosites are reset to start the exposure-process for the next video frame.

CCD chips will generally see better in low light conditions because of the CCD's nature of capturing more light in the infrared range, but will severely lack in the human visibility spectrum, thus sacrificing color, on the other hand CMOS imagers do not have great low light capability but will capture the visible spectrum better and thus displaying color properly.

Recorder

The third section, the recorder, is responsible for writing the video-signal onto a recording medium (such as magnetic videotape.) The record function involves many signal-processing steps, and historically, the recording-process introduced some distortion and noise into the stored video, such that playback of the stored-signal may not retain the same characteristics/detail as the live video feed.

All but the most primitive camcorders imaginable also need to have a recorder-controlling section which allows the user to control the camcorder, switch the recorder into playback mode for reviewing the recorded footage and an image control section which controls exposure, focus and white-balance.

The image recorded need not be limited to what appeared in the viewfinder. For documentation of events, such as used by police, the field of view overlays such things as the time and date of the recording along the top and bottom of the image. Such things as the police car or constable to which the recorder has been allotted may also appear; also the speed of the car at the time of recording. Compass direction at time of recording and geographical coordinates may also be possible. These are not kept to world-standard fields; "month/day/year" may be seen, as well as "day/month/year", besides the ISO standard "year-month-day". And the Danish police have the speed of the police car in the units "km/t" sic (time being Danish for "hour").

Consumer camcorders

Analog vs. digital

Camcorders are often classified by their storage device: VHS, VHS-C, Betamax, Video8 are examples of older, videotape-based camcorders which record video in analog form. Newer camcorders include Digital8, MiniDV, DVD, Hard Disk and solid-state (flash) semiconductor memory, which all record video in digital form. (Please see the digital video page for details.) In older digital camcorders, the imager-chip, the CCD was considered an analog component, so the digital namesake is in reference to the camcorder's processing and recording of the video. Many next generation camcorders use a CMOS imager, which register photons as binary data as soon as the photons hit the imager and thus tightly marrying part 2 and 3.

It should be noted that the take up of digital video storage in camcorders was an enormous milestone. MiniDV storage allows full resolution video (720x576 for PAL,720x480 for NTSC), unlike previous analogue video standards. Digital video doesn't experience colour bleeding, jitter, or fade, although some users still prefer the analog nature of Hi8 and Super VHS-C, since neither of these produce the "background blur" or "mosquito noise" of Digital compression. In many cases, a high-quality analog recording shows more detail (such as rough textures on a wall) than a compressed digital recording (which would show the same wall as flat and featureless). Although, the low resolution of analogue camcorders may negate any such benefits.

The highest-quality digital formats, such as Digital Betacam and DVCPRO HD, have the advantage over analog of suffering little generation loss in recording, dubbing, and editing (MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 do suffer from generation loss in the editing process only). Whereas noise and bandwidth problems relating to cables, amplifiers, and mixers can greatly affect analog recordings, such problems are minimal in digital formats using digital connections (generally IEEE 1394, SDI/SDTI, or HDMI).

Although both analog and digital can suffer from archival problems, digital is more prone to complete loss. Theoretically digital information can be stored indefinitely with zero deterioration on a digital storage device (such as a hard drive), however since some digital formats (like MiniDV) often squeeze tracks only ~10 micrometers apart (versus ~500 μm for VHS), a digital recording is more vulnerable to wrinkles or stretches in the tape that could permanently erase several scenes worth of digital data, but the additions tracking and error correction code on the tape will generally compensate for most defects. On analog media similar damage barely registers as "noise" in the video, still leaving a deteriorated but watchable video. The only limitation is that this video has to be played on a completely analogue viewing system, otherwise the tape will not display any video due to the damage and sync problems. Even digital recordings on DVD are known to suffer from DVD rot that permanently erase huge chunks of data. Thus the one advantage analog seems to have in this respect is that an analog recording may be "usable" even after the media it is stored on has suffered severe deterioration whereas it has been noticed that even slight media degradation in digital recordings may cause them to suffer from an "all or nothing" failure, i.e. the digital recording will end up being totally un-playable without very expensive restoration work.

Modern recording media

For more information, see tapeless camcorder.

Some recent camcorders record video on flash memory devices, Microdrives, small hard disks, and size-reduced DVD-RAM or DVD-Rs using MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 formats. However because these codecs use inter-frame compression, frame-specific-editing requires frame regeneration, which incurs additional processing and can cause loss of picture information. (In professional usage, it is common to use a codec that will store every frame inidividually. This provides easier and faster frame-specific editing of scenes.)

Most other digital consumer camcorders record in DV or HDV format on tape and transfer content over FireWire (some also use USB 2.0) to a computer, where the huge files (for DV, 1GB for 4 to 4.6 minutes in PAL/NTSC resolutions) can be edited, converted, and (with many camcorders) also recorded back to tape. The transfer is done in real time, so the complete transfer of a 60 minute tape needs one hour to transfer and about 13GB disk space for the raw footage only - excluding any space needed for render files, and other media. Time spent in post-production (editing) to select and cut the best shots varies from instantaneous "magic" movies to hours of tedious selection, arrangement and rendering.

Consumer market

As the mass consumer market favors ease of use, portability, and price, most of the consumer-grade camcorders sold today emphasize handling and automation features over raw audio/video performance. This segment has followed an evolutionary path driven by relentless miniaturization and cost-reduction, made possible by progress in design and manufacturing. Miniaturization conflicts with the imager's ability to gather-light, and designers have delicately balanced improvements in sensor-sensitivity with sensor-size reduction, shrinking the overall camera imager & optics, while maintaining reasonablely noise-free video in broad daylight. Indoor or dim light shooting is generally unacceptably noisy, and in such conditions, artificial lighting is highly recommended. Mechanical controls do not scale below a certain-size, and manual camera-operation has given way to camera-controlled automation for every shooting parameter (focus, aperature, shutter-speed, white balance, etc.) The few models that do retain manual-override frequently require the user to navigate a cumbersome menu-interface. Outputs include USB 2.0, Composite and S-Video, and IEEE 1394/Firewire (for MiniDV models). On the plus-side, today's camcorders are affordable to a wider-segment of the consumer market, and available in a wider variety of formfactors and functionality, from the classic camcorder-shape, to small flip-cameras, to video-capable camera-phones and digicams.

At the high-end of the consumer-market, there is a greater emphasis on user-control and advanced shooting modes. Feature-wise, there is some overlap between the high-end consumer and prosumer markets. More expensive consumer camcorders generally offer manual exposure control, HDMI-output and external audio-input, progressive-scan frame-rates (24fps, 25fps, 30fps), and better lenses than basic models. In order to maximize low-light capability, color-reproduction, and frame-resolution, a few manufacturers offer multi-CCD/CMOS camcorders, which mimic the 3-element imager design used in professional equipment. Field tests have demonstrated most consumer camcorders (regardless of price), to produce noisy video in low light.

Before the 21st century, video editing was a difficult task requiring a minimum of two recorders. Now, the typical home Personal Computer can hold several hours of standard-definition video, and is fast enough to edit footage without additional upgrades. Most consumer camcorders are sold with a basic video editing program, so users can easily create their own DVD-videos, or share their edited-footage online.

In the first world market, nearly all camcorders sold today are digital. Tape-based (MiniDV/HDV) camcorders are declining in popularity, as tapeless models (miniDVD, SD-card, hard-drive) cost almost the same, but offer greater convenience. For example, video captured on SD-card can be transferred to PC much faster than digital-tape. Hard-disk camcorders feature the longest continuous recording-time, though the durability of the Hard Drive is a concern for harsh and high-altitude environments. Footage from miniDVD camcorders can be dropped into and player on a DVD-player.

As of 2007, analog camcorders are still available but not widely marketed anymore. Even with a street price below US$200, both digital-tape and basic-tapeless technology have reached price parity with the older analog-tape, which suffers many disadvantages compared to the newer units, and all low-end camcorders face market pressure from the rising popularity of multi-function devices (cameraphones, digicams) with basic video-recording capability.

Uses

Media

Camcorders have found use in nearly all corners of electronic media, from electronic news organizations to TV/current-affairs productions. In locations away from a distribution infrastructure, camcorders are invaluable for initial video acquisition. Subsequently, the video is transmitted electronically to a studio/production center for broadcast. Scheduled events such as official press conferences, where a video infrastructure is readily available or can be feasibly deployed in advance, are still covered by studio-type video cameras (tethered to "production trucks.")

Home video

For casual use, camcorders often cover weddings, birthdays, graduation ceremonies, kids growing up, and other personal events. The rise of the consumer camcorder in the mid to late '80s led to the creation of shows such as the long-running America's Funniest Home Videos, where people could showcase homemade video footage.

Politics

Political protestors who have capitalized on the value of media coverage use camcorders to film things they believe to be unjust. Animal rights protesters who break into factory farms and animal testing labs use camcorders to film the conditions the animals are living in. Anti-hunting protesters film fox hunts. Tax protesters provide live coverage of anti-tax demonstrations and protests. Anti-globalization protesters film the police to deter police brutality. If the police do use violence there will be evidence on video. Activist videos often appear on Indymedia.

The police use camcorders to film riots, protests and the crowds at sporting events. The film can be used to spot and pick out troublemakers, who can then be prosecuted in court.

Entertainment and movies

Camcorders are often used in the production of low-budget TV shows where the production crew does not have access to more expensive equipment. There are even examples of movies shot entirely on consumer camcorder equipment (such as The Blair Witch Project and 28 Days Later). In addition, many academic filmmaking programs have switched from 16mm film to digital video, due to the vastly reduced expense and ease of editing of the digital medium as well as the increasing scarcity of film stock and equipment. Some camcorder manufacturers cater to this market, particularly Canon and Panasonic, who both support "24p" (24 frame/s, progressive scan; same frame rate as standard cinema film) video in some of their high-end models for easy film conversion.

Even high-budget cinema is done using camcorders in some cases; George Lucas used Sony CineAlta camcorders in two of his three Star Wars prequel movies. This process is referred to as digital cinematography.

Formats

The following list covers consumer equipment only. (For other formats see Videotape)

Analog

Lo-Band: Approximately 3 megahertz bandwidth (250 lines EIA resolution or ~333x480 edge-to-edge)
BCE (1954): First tape storage for video, manufactured by Bing Crosby Entertainment from Ampex equipment.
BCE Coloer (1955): First color tape storage for video, manufactured by Bing Crosby Entertainment from Ampex equipment.
Simplex (1955): Developed commercially by RCA and used to record several live broadcasts by NBC.
Quadruplex (1955): Developed formally by Ampex, and this became the recording standard for the next 20 years.
Vera (1955): An experimental recording standard developed by the BBC, but was never used or sold commercially.
Umatic (1971): The initial tape used by Sony to record video.
Umatics (1974): A small sized version of Umatic used for portable recorders.
Betamax (1975): Only used on very old Sony and Sanyo camcorders and portables; obsolete by the mid/late-80s in the consumer market.
Type B (1976): Co-developed by Sony and Ampex and this became the broadcast standard in europe for most of the 1980s.
Type C (1976): Co-developed by Sony and Ampex.
VHS (1976): Compatible with VHS standard VCRs, though VHS camcorders are no longer made.
VHS-C (1982): Originally designed for portable VCRs, this standard was later adapted for use in compact consumer camcorders; identical in quality to VHS; cassettes play in standard VHS VCRs using an adapter. Still available in the low-end consumer market (JVC model GR-AXM18 is VHS-C; see page 19 of the owner's manual). Relatively short running time compared to other formats.
Betacam (1982): Introduced by Sony as a 1/2 inch tape for professional video recorders.
Video8 (1985): Small-format tape developed by Sony to combat VHS-C's compact palm-sized design; equivalent to VHS or Betamax in picture quality, but not compatible. High quality audio as standard.
Hi-Band: Approximately 5 megahertz bandwidth (420 lines EIA resolution or ~550x480 edge-to-edge)
Umatic BVU (1982): Largely used in high-end consumer and professional equipment. The introduction of Umatic BVU spelled the end of 16mm film recordings.
Umatic BVU-SP (1985): Largely used in high-end consumer and professional equipment. The introduction of Umatic BVU spelled the end of 16mm film recordings.
Betacam-SP (1986): An minor upgrade to the Betacam format, but because of the upgrade, it became a broadcast standard.
MII (1986): Panasonic's answer to Betacam-SP
S-VHS (1987): Largely used in medium-end consumer and prosumer equipment; rare among mainstream consumer equipment, and rendered obsolete by digital gear like DigiBetacam and DV.
S-VHS-C (1987): An upgrade to provide near-laserdisc quality. Now limited to the low-end consumer market (example: JVC SXM38). As per VHS-C, relatively short running time compared to other formats.
Hi8 (1988): Enhanced-quality Video8; roughly equivalent to Super VHS in picture quality, but not compatible. High quality audio as standard. Now limited to low-end consumer market (example: Sony TRV138)

Digital

Umatic (1982): An experiments overhaul was made to umatic to record digital video, but this was impractical and the tapes were used as a transport for digital audio only. This led to the D series of tapes about 4 years later.
D1 (Sony) (1986): The first digital video recorder. It used digitized component video, encoded at Y'CbCr 4:2:2 using the CCIR 601 raster form and experimentally supported full HD broadcasts.
D2 (video format) (1988): This was a cheap alternative the D1 tape created by Ampex and this actually encoded video digitally instead of sampling composite video and experimentally supported full HD broadcasts.
D3 (1991): Created by Panasonic to compete with the Ampex D2 and experimentally supported full HD broadcasts.
DCT (videocassette format) (1992): This was the first compressed video tape format created by Ampex based on the D1 format. It used discrete cosine transform as its codec of choice. DST was a data-only standard introduced to the rapidly growing IT industry.
D5 HD (1994): 1080i digital standard introduced by Sony based on the D1 tape.
Editcam (1995): First drive recording standard introduced by Ikegami. FieldPak used a IDE hard and RAMPak used a set of flash ram modules. It can record in DV25, Avid JFIF, DV, MPEG IMX, DVCPRO50, and Avid DNxHD format, depending on generation.
Digital-s (1995): JVC debuted a digital tape similar to VHS but had a different tape inside and supported digital HD broadcasts. Widely used by FOX broadcasting. Also called D-9.
MiniDV (1995): Smaller version of the DV standard released by Sony. Became the most widespread standard-definition digital camcorder technology for several years.
DVD (1995): Uses either Mini DVD-R or DVD-RAM. This is a multi-manufacturer standard that uses 8 cm DVD discs for 30 minutes of video. DVD-R can be played on consumer DVD players but cannot be added to or recorded over once finalized for viewing. DVD-RAM can be added to and/or recorded over, but cannot be played on many consumer DVD players, and costs a lot more than other types of DVD recordable media. The DVD-RW is another option allowing the user to re-record, but only records sequentially and must be finalized for viewing. The discs do cost more than the DVD-R format, which only records once. DVD discs are also very vulnerable to scratches. DVD camcorders are generally not designed to connect to computers for editing purposes, though some high-end DVD units do record surround sound, a feature not standard with DV equipment.
DV (1996): Sony debuted the DV format tape with DVCAM being professional and DVCPRO being a Panasonic variant.
D-VHS (1998): JVC debuted the digital standard of VHS tape and which supported 1080p HD. Many units also supported IEEE1394 recording.
Digital8 (1999): Uses Hi8 tapes (Sony is the only company currently producing D8 camcorders, though Hitachi once also did). Most, but not all models of Digital 8 cameras have the ability to read older Video8 and Hi8 analog format tapes. The format's technical specifications are of the same quality as MiniDV (both use the same DV codec), and although no professional-level Digital8 equipment exists, D8 has been used to make TV and movie productions (example: Hall of Mirrors).
MICROMV (2001): Uses a matchbox-sized cassette. Sony was the only electronics manufacturer for this format, and editing software was proprietary to Sony and only available on Microsoft Windows; however, open source programmers did manage to create capture software for Linux[http://www.kinodv.org/article/view/54/1/11/]. The hardware is no longer in production, though tapes are still available through Sony.
XDCAM (2003): A professional blu-ray standard introduced by Sony. This is similar to that of regular BRD but used different codecs, namely MPEG IMX, DV25 (DVCAM), MPEG-4, MPEG-2, and HD422.
Blu-ray Disc (2003): Presently, Hitachi is the only manufacturer of Blu-ray Disc camcorders.
P2 (2004): First solid state recording medium of professional quality, introduced by Panasonic. Recorded DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO-HD, or AVC-Intra stream onto the card.
HDV (2004): Records up to an hour of HDTV MPEG-2 signal roughly equal to broadcast quality HD on a standard MiniDV cassette.
SxS (2007): Jointly developed by Sony and Sandisk. This is a solid state format of XDCAM and is known as XDCAM EX.
MPEG-2 codec based format, which records MPEG-2 program stream or MPEG-2 transport stream to various kinds of tapeless media (hard disks, solid-state memory, etc). Used both for standard definition (JVC, Panasonic) and high definition (JVC) recording.
H.264, shorthand term for compressed video using the H.264 codec that is part of the MPEG-4 standard in an MPEG-4 file most often stored to tapeless media.
AVCHD, a format that puts H.264 video into a transport stream file format. The video is compressed according to the MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264) format, but the file format is not MPEG-4.

Digital camcorders and operating systems

Since most manufacturers focus their support on Windows and Mac users, users of other operating systems often are unable to receive support for these devices. However, open source products such as Cinelerra and Kino (written for the Linux operating system) do allow full editing of some digital formats on alternative operating systems, and software to edit DV streams in particular is available on most platforms.

Source: Wikipedia

Translation

The word "Camcorder" occurs as such in the following languages: English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, Vietnamese.

Translation(s) in other languages: Bulgarian: Видеокамера, Czech: Videokamera, Danish: Videokamera, Persian: دوربین ویدیویی, French: Caméscope, Korean: 캠코더, Japanese: カムコーダ, Polish: Kamera cyfrowa, Russian: Видеокамера, Swedish: Videokamera, Tamil: நிகழ்படக்கருவி, Cantonese: 手提攝錄機, Chinese: 攝影機.


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