The first video I ever made was "American Money" a 3 minute video for 8th grade history class. I did almost no research or preparation, to the point where I was drawing each frame before shooting. Oddly enough I have met producers with the same preparation skills!
Seriously, it was one of several school projects using video. Note to reader, this was in 1986 using a video camera attached to a boom box sized "portable" VHS recorder.
The secret to these early videos was in-camera editing. Shoot what you want in the sequence it needs to be and don't screw up!
The next video was "30 Minutes: Ancient Rome," with Dave N. as host and myself and Joe C as correspondents. This was a jump forward intechnology to a 8mm camcorder, roughly the size of a toaster oven. This was such high technology that I was not allowed to touch the thing. My dad, to my great embarrassment, had to do the camera operation. This project included more preparation, mainly consisting of Dave N. writing everything, and giving me the most boring parts to read, on camera, with no visuals. The one fun part was I got to build aRoman house using foam core, and demonstrate this on-camera.
Despite these two experiences, I decided to go to college for broadcasting.
In college our first assignment in EFP class was to make an in-camera edited video of a sequence. It was actually a decent way to learn about editing, which we did not learn until later using the very high tech u-matic edit bay.
So what in-camera editing experiences have I had lately? Since the advent of cheap tape I just leave the camera rolling. In shooting medical procedures you don't want to miss something during the second it takes for the tape to start rolling. But in the old days when tape was non-cheap, we did a certain amount of in-camera editing. At the least it made the actual rough cut faster, since there was less material to work with.
Cheap though DV tape may be, logging just the shots I need is indeed more tedious with a lack of in-camera editing.
Insert profound life lesson here.
