Researchers are increasingly using video in their fieldwork. Starting with cheap analogue formats and now digital formats, it is easy and affordable to begin video-taping everything… In the same way that we can now record audio for everything.
\n…Well, actually I’m not quite convinced yet.<\/p>\n
\nI’ve got some ideas about what to do in future field trips, but I’m wondering what everyone else out there does. I found my video-taped sessions extremely useful, especially in eliciting spatially oriented material. However, I’m a bit unhappy with what’s currently out there in terms of technology.
\nFor a start, MiniDV, which is what most people seem to be using is really what I would call a pseudo-digital format. Although the signal is digitised at the recording time, it is still recorded onto tape media. Which means that while its on the tape you can’t “jump around” quickly. Secondly the date-stamp and time-stamp metadata seems to be inconsistently added from recorder to recorder. I’ve yet to see anyone pay the extra cash for the CM type miniDV tapes either, but that is supposed to store extra metadata. I haven’t seen auto-segmenting of video files work consistently, and in dealing with a few older tapes recently, I’ve realised the tape deteriorates quite quickly (digital glitches look terrible<\/i> as well!).
\nI guess to be fair, digital video produces media files many times bigger than high quality audio recorders, and storage isn’t that cheap. Tape is a nice cheap way of recording lots of data (so is compression, which is used in all consumer level formats).
\nComing to a decision about the “necessary” quality of video recordings is much harder than the case for audio. While high quality audio is justifiable, there’s no “acoustic analysis” equivalent argument for video… visual quality seems to me to be a lot more subjective. I thought DVDs looked amazing compared to VHS when they were first released. But now DVDs look shocking compared to the newer standards. So setting minimum standards is a bit more complex, especially considering that storage capacity hasn’t caught up to what’s needed for raw digital video yet. Its a mixture of video resolution, frame-rate and compression to reduce the size.
\nWhat I’d really like to see is a digital video recorder that works exactly like a digital camera. First of all it segments recordings into separate files. Breaking up a video dump into separate resources is just more work for the fieldworker. These files should have good metadata like the hardware model and make, CCD data, date and time stamps. More difficult would be exposure statistics and so on, these would have to be by frame presumably… which I’m guessing would be harder to implement. Some time in the future I imagine that a digital camera that can shoot photos fast enough to be a video will be possible (well, it kind of is possible at the moment, but at reduced resolution, and without per frame metadata). Good metadata is critical for speedy research. If you’ve got simultaneous audio and video recordings they should show up together<\/i> in a file-system listing sorted by creation date!
\nNewer video recorders seem to be flooding the market now. There are consumer brand Digital Video recorders that record straight to an internal hard disk or DVD burner. I’d be interested to hear from anyone that has used these to see what kind of files they produce.
\nI’m also interested in the cheaper video recorders that go straight to flash cards. These do seem to use lower than PAL\/NSTC resolution, with heavy compression, but as a trade-off you could instead afford to purchase a couple to record from two or more viewpoints.
\nPerhaps the best thing about these pure digital recorders is that they bypass the 60 or 90 minute limit of recordings. How many times have you just wanted to start the recorder and walk away for a couple of hours?
\nI’ve been toying with the idea of using a high quality web-cam hooked up to a laptop too… this would let you record continuously for hours, and you could plug in more than one web-cam too.
\nAnyhow, what is your experience? Have you mucked around with any of these newer recorders?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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