Latest obsession
My latest obsession, as Lisa will attest, is my new camcorder. As with most of my gadgets, it's a bit old-school - a 100% analogue Video8 Handycam by Sony, a CCD-TR330E, circa 1995 (as far as I can make out). It shoots in standard, VHS-class video, so not quite SD let alone HD, and there's no USB or plug and play with this model, but still - it's a good little movie camera, it has a decent 10x zoom lens, and it's nice and compact. We already have a DVD recorder, so I'm archiving all my footage to that, which means I have a perfect digital source if I want to start mucking around with it on the PC - so maybe the site will start sprouting some video soon, you never know.
The best part? Well you'll have guessed I didn't pick this up at Argos. I actually picked it up at the local dump. Despite being in near-perfect condition, and needing only a cheap (or in my case free) new battery to get it working, someone actually threw this away, leaving me to pay the princely sum of £3 for both the camera and its charger! I know people always say it's amazing what people throw away, but it really is, isn't it?
__________________________
Delete! Delete!
How i wish you hadn't chosen
How i wish you hadn't chosen that day to go to the dump...
__________________________Honestly now...
you don't really mean
you don't really mean that.... £3!!
__________________________Delete! Delete!
Aah, Video8.... I remember
Aah, Video8.... I remember the days. Remember my tips in the forum, and if you'd like any help or tips should you decide to go mucking about with it on the PC, I'm your man.
Wow
I've always wanted a camcorder, but they were always so expensive. Wish I could pick one up cheap like that.
__________________________Party!
I may well, it's not
I may well, I've never done anything with digital video before... I'm naively assuming I can just pop my DVD in the PC and use the video from that in Windows Movie Maker for starters - am I close?
My dad had quite a high-end Hi8 (S-VHS equivalent of Video8) camcorder when I was a teenager, so I used to pester people with that quite a lot, and I got fairly adept at old-style video editing, when that meant actually editing onto another video, complete with a mixing board for sound and picture fades. All my films were complete junk, but at least now they're fairly nostalgic junk. These days, just being able to dub everything to DVD without any quality loss seems like a big leap forward for me
That old Hi8 cam developed a fault a little while ago, but luckily I was able to pinch the battery off it for mine. My dad's since upgraded to another Hi8 camera (off ebay), so we're still an analogue family..
__________________________Delete! Delete!
Get down the dump!
Get down the dump! Seriously, our local one seems to get a few of these in fairly regularly, in various states of repair - I think a lot of people bought these in the 90's without really knowing what they were going to do with them, ended up putting them in a cupboard for ten years, and now they're throwing them away because they're "not digital"...
Alternatively, if you don't want your friends to start calling you stig, cameras similar to mine are selling for around £15-25 on ebay(c/w battery, and some assurance that they actually work!)
__________________________Delete! Delete!