Introduction

This book is a comprehensive field guide to the concepts, strategies, equipment, and procedures for achieving the best results possible with Canon’s top-of-the line palm-sized camcorders. The guide focuses on the specific features of the Canon Vixia HF G10 and XA10, but users of other camcorders in the Vixia series, the Legria series (shooting PAL), and other camcorders will find a wealth of relevant information.

The small size and ergonomics of the palm-sized camcorder are its biggest assets. Since the middle of the last century, visionary media makers have sought to make motion-picture cameras and eventually video camcorders more compact and mobile. The miniaturization of equipment has had an increasing impact on the aesthetics, economics, content, and even politics of media making.

In 1948, critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc theorized that only when the motion-picture camera becomes as portable and accessible as a pen is to an author, can filmmaking become as personal and profound as other art forms. Astruc’s concept of the “camera-stylo” (camera/pen) foreshadowed the emergence of the French New Wave, Direct Cinema, Cinéma Vérité, Dogme 95, and numerous independent film and video artists, activists, and media collectives throughout the world. Yet perhaps only now, with the introduction of the first generation of professional palm-sized high-definition camcorders, have we truly entered the age of the “camera-stylo.” Home video makers, aspiring filmmakers, journalists, schools, and professional media makers are acquiring high-quality palm-sized camcorders in unprecedented numbers. Temple University, for example, has 900 Film & Media Arts majors, 700 Broadcasting majors, and thousands of other students from Communications, Journalism, Theater, Advertising, Speech, Graphic Arts, Design, Psychology, and Anthropology who use palm-sized camcorders during their training. Tiny professional-quality camcorders are in the forefront of today’s media-making revolution.

The increasing portability of professional, semi-professional, and non-professional motion-picture media has had a significant effect on documentary and news in particular, and even fiction film production. In 1948, documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock (“Ricky” to those who knew him) was hired at age 27 as the cinematographer for Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story. The feature film was shot in 35mm and although it was a fictional story using local residents as actors, it followed Robert Flaherty’s observational approach of shooting large amounts of footage at real locations, evolving the story as they went along, and piecing it together in the editing room. Their 35mm camera was lighter than studio models but still quite cumbersome. The production took 14 months to film.

In 1960, Leacock along with filmmakers David and Albert Maysles, filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, and producer Robert Drew pioneered a new, mobile, hand-held movement in documentary called “Direct Cinema” that placed the spectator intimately in the middle of ongoing events. Leacock, who had studied physics at Harvard, and Pennebaker, who had a degree in engineering from Yale, actually developed modifications to existing 16mm film cameras for sound synchronization and portable battery operation. Commercially made portable sync sound cameras soon followed. Some of the landmark Direct Cinema films include Primary, a behind-the-scenes view of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign; Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, on a major moment in the civil-rights struggle; Leacock’s Happy Mother’s Day, on the birth of quintuplets (which ABC refused to air because it was too honest); Pennebaker’s feature film on Bob Dylan Don’t Look Back; and the Maysles brothers’ features Salesman, Gimmie Shelter, and Grey Gardens. Simultaneous with the Direct Cinema movement in the United States was the Cinéma Vérité movement pioneered in France by Jean Rouch and in Canada with cinematographer Michel Brault. Portability was essential for the making of all these films.

Leacock eventually headed the graduate Film program at MIT from 1968 to 1989 that in turn produced a new generation of hand-held documentary makers including Ross McElwee, Jeff Kreines, Joel DeMott, Ann Schaetzel, and David Parry. Over the years, I had many long conversations with Leacock, as we served together as trustees of the University Film Study Center housed at MIT and Harvard and ran a summer film institute at Hampshire College. Leacock, more than anyone else, promoted the development of small, mobile, hand-held cameras that could shoot in available light with sync sound and provide greater immediacy with “the feeling of actually being there.” He experimented with adapting Super-8 film and portable video for professional purposes long before small-format video was used commercially. Even after retiring from MIT, Leacock pushed the limits of small-format video by making Les Oeufs a la Coque (The Eggs of the Cock, a phrase for poached eggs and a pun on his name), a feature-length production shot with a tiny 8mm Handycam and broadcast in prime time on French television in 1991.

In 1990, during the Gulf War, broadcast field reports relied on consumer camcorders. Models such as Canon’s Hi8 A1 proved to be mobile and effective in heat, sand, and precarious combat conditions where newscasters feared to take more expensive and cumbersome equipment. The Canon Hi8 A1 Mk II had a double seal to protect its tape mechanism from sand. Today’s solid-state camcorders have considerably more ability to document reality and gather news under difficult circumstances.

In 1995, Danish filmmakers, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, founded the Dogme 95 movement. They signed a 10-point “vow of chastity” declaring that they would make feature fiction films “by any means available” under almost documentary limitations: hand held, available light, unaltered locations, no filters, and no special effects. Vinterberg’s low-budget feature The Celebration (Festen) was shot under these conditions by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle using a consumer mini-DV camcorder. The Celebration was blown up to 35mm for theatrical release; when it won the Jury Prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, the floodgates opened worldwide to small-format feature filmmaking. In 2000, Spike Lee shot Bamboozled in mini-DV with a Sony VX 1000. In 2002, Dod Mantle shot 28 Days Later under director Danny Boyle using a Canon XL-1 mini-DV camcorder, and won the Academy Award for Cinematography in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, which was shot 60% digitally with a Silicon Imaging SI-2K camera (2,048,×1,142 pixels). The film itself won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Camcorders such as the Vixia HF G10 and XA10 will never produce the look of the uncompressed images of the SI-2K, the Red One, or a 35mm Panaflex with $40,000 interchangeable lenses. But not every production needs that look or can afford that technology. In their price range, the G10 and XA10 are sharper, cleaner, more compact, more portable, and more laden with professional features than any prior palm-sized camcorder. They blur the line between “pro-sumer” and professional, and in the right hands they can be powerful media-making tools for a wide range of applications.

We are in the middle of a digital media revolution. The working poor in developing nations find it essential to own cell phones, and many of these devices also record video. Camcorders from amateur to professional quality are ubiquitous throughout the world. An enterprising person can set up a video business with about the same investment it would take to acquire an auto-rickshaw to become a taxi driver in Asia or Africa. Entire countries that had never been able to produce their own movies have burgeoning motion-picture industries based on HD video. Collectives working for social change record video and exhibit via the Internet, where it can be viewed by dozens, thousands, or millions. There is an enormous democratizing potential when media ownership and access can no longer be fully controlled or stifled by governments or by institutions or owned only by the wealthy. If you have access to a high-definition palm-sized camcorder, your potential is limited only by your imagination and your resourcefulness.

Companion Website Downloads

There are several appendixes and a glossary for this book, which are available online. These cover camcorder and file precautions, Canon XA10 and G10 diagrams, a menu map, comparison charts for various camcorders, basic keyboard commands for major editing software programs, and troubleshooting.You may download these companion files from www.courseptr.com/downloads. Please note that you will be redirected to the Cengage Learning site.