How times change!
Just recently I’ve been digitising some of our old tapes to hard drive before they deteriorate and the machines are no longer available to play them. One tape I came across from 1996 was called “Looking at Digital Shooting and Editing” it was produced by a good friend of ours from our early days in video, Gwynne Williams from Usk.
I’d been asked to visit the Philippines with a church group to produce a video for them and I was having trouble deciding what format camera to take, BetaSP and MII were too big and heavy as I’d be ‘up country’ in very remote areas, SVHS and Hi8 although easier to carry just didn’t have the quality I needed.
One of our editing clients had just used the new ‘Digital video format’ in one of his productions that we edited on our new digital editing system called Media100, and I was amazed at the quality in comparison with the better known professional format BetaSP which he normally used, so I decided to try a new digital camera from Sony, the DCR-VX1000.
I borrowed one to try from H.Preston in Malvern and together with Gwynne we did some tests in Llandovery town, back in my edit suite we decided the quality was stunning and more than suitable for my trip to the Philippines.
Gwynne was in the stages of producing his video “Looking at Digital Shooting and Editing” and asked if I’d be interviewed to talk about my choice, to which I agreed. In the photo from the video, I’m holding one of the first VX1000’s in the UK, the computer screen is showing an early Media100 editing system on an Apple Mac that we both had and used.
It was interesting watching the video as it digitised, and reflecting on the prices in 1996, over £3000 for the camera, £3000 for a 4Gb hard drive and the Media 100 system was just over £14k!
