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90 P a r t I I Producing Your YouTube Videos

Understanding Consumer Video Equipment

When I was a kid, my dad shot home movies using a Super 8 film camera. The
movies themselves were about what you would expect—lots of cute little kids mug-
ging about in a dark, shaky, poorly focused little film.

Well, all that’s changed. Thanks to today’s digital video technology, you can now
shoot videos in high resolution and edit them on your home computer. The results
are often indistinguishable from what you’d get from a professional video produc-
tion house, complete with sophisticated editing and special effects. And the costs
are no more, in today’s terms, than what my dad spent back when I was a youth.

It’s amazing: Digital video recording lets you use your PC as a movie-editing studio
to create sophisticated videos for YouTube distribution.

How Camcorders Work

The key to successful semi-pro video production is to start with a digital cam-
corder. Fortunately, now that older analog VHS camcorders have been relegated to
the garbage bin or to Craigslist classified ads, virtually every camcorder sold today
records in a digital format.

The nice thing about today’s digital camcorders is that they’re easy enough for even
an executive to use, and they produce high quality results. Just point the camcorder,
press the Record button, and zoom into the shot. Some higher-end camcorders fea-
ture image stabilization technology, so shaky pictures are a thing of the past. And,
with today’s digital recording formats, the movies you shoot are at professional
quality levels.

Let’s start with the basics. As you can tell from its name, a camcorder is actually two
devices in one, combining a video camera and video recorder into a single unit. The
camera part of the unit senses the image, and the recorder section records it.

In the camera part of the camcorder, the process starts when the image is seen
through the camera’s lens. The higher quality the lens, the more light passes
through it without distortion of the image.

The image as seen by the lens is beamed onto a charge-coupled device (CCD),
which is an electronic chip that captures the light falling on it and converts the light
to electrical signals. Most consumer-level camcorders use a single CCD to capture
the video image. Some high-end camcorders, however, use three CCDs, one for
each of the primary colors (red, green, and blue), which provides better detail and
color. Most professional video cameras use a three-CCD design.