Pocket Viddie

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Does it ever occur to you to walk around shooting video? Do you currently have any viddie gear?

Have you got any pocket money?

I really enjoy the Toycam. Take a look at this.

That's 4:46 put together with five or six (I think) shots taken out the window of the 747 on the way to Japan. It looks at the Spaceship thing: being aboard, for that long, something moving that largely across the world. Shots of Canada, Alaska and Siberia from something above 35,000 feet. (Watch for diverging traffic at about 4:00 along the way.) I'd wake up or put the book down every now and then, whip out the Toycam from a jacket pocket, and look out the window at over twelve hours of time going by in huge geographic steps.

The spaceship fascinates me. This stuff is shot from seat 61K: starboard side window seat in Livestock Class. I got a good look at the wing on takeoff from Detroit (about two minutes not edited into the current download piece), which is probably at least a hundred thousand pound structure doing big things at moving air with various mechanics. Then, of course, it's the only human artifact to frame in a viddie shot in the looks in "WhisperHigh". It's an amazing thing -- that winglet out there on the tip is six feet tall -- how it all sails along like that, above almost all the weather on the planet, with hundreds of live people aboard.

Somewhere around here, I have a video that I lashed together with my Sony Mavica: the first digital camera I owned, about 1998 or '99. It's the port wing of a 747 coming into Tokyo in a driving rain, with condensation blowing off the wing in great sheets. It was put together with fifteen-second shots taken as fast as that camera could write to a floopy-disk and I could swap 'em out. I forget what I edited it with, but it was a cool little movie looking at the subject like that, and, I was taken with the whole idea of digital video like that; I got used to what Sabotta calls "TinyScope": when it's taken care of, 320x 240 is a pretty good format for Web distribution, and I've enjoyed trying to get the most out of it.

The Toycam comes along in the history of this stuff at a price point that puts the old Mavica way in the deep shade; the money is strictly casual, and the fun-factor -- to me -- goes way off the top.

Looking at the toycam market for nearly two years now, and only three months after my birthday Toycam, I'd made up my mind that I would drop a bit of the Japan-jaunt booty on a viddie hardware upgrade. I'd been thinking that I might spend as much as $450 or so, and was looking at all the toycams -- Aiptek, Mustek, et. all out-to-there; there are lots of them in the class, which runs right up under what some of the A-line manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic are starting to do. The main idea is one-hand performance, and a real premium here is digital storage: one defining element of the class is tapeless and diskless storage. This means digital desktop files right off the bat, although viddie-out to a TV (RCA connectors) is a virtual prerequisite, too.

The real toycam class player gives up known performance and/or feature values for price. They're toy cameras, and they're charming for that. Frame-rates have been among the first values given up -- averaging maybe 12-15fps across the whole class for a long time (a couple of years!) -- although, again: it's fun to see what can be done with the format. (And; fps rates have improving on average across the class.) Look at that Coots viddie; edited from both DVD-cam and Toycam, and it comes off very neatly. Low-light performance is usually rotten, but if the toycams are put to proper use, they're pretty damned cool. Look around: you don't see many people looking at the world in a video-frame, in the way that's possible now with just about disposable video hardware and a 24/7 global outlet for what they might see with it.

Well. Anyway. The Toycam has been so cool that I decided I was going to do what I was doing with it a bit better, and I started digging around when I got home. Listen. If you ever think about walking around with a video camera the size of a pack of cigarettes and just shooting willy-nilly at stuff you see around you, then run right over to your local Radio Shack with two hundred bucks and get one of these --

Sanyo C40. It pretty much does exactly what it looks like it does. I just bought one yesterday, and I'm knocked out. This is nearly a categorical step up from the toycams, at nearly the price of most of them.

One thing that I like about many toycams is AA or AAA batteries. I'm not crazy about proprietary batts when I can get around them, because I'd rather pay for energy right when I need it (an airport terminal?) than have to sit down (plug in) and suck it up in time. The C40 batt is proprietary and only runs about seventy minutes or so. I'll have to line up at least one more, and that's that. But it writes a 640x480 image at 30fps to SD cards. I've got a 2gb in it (SanDisk, forty bucks -- watch for sales), and it does something like five hours of that. The feature list is too long to run here, and its viddie-out image to TV looks pretty damned good, except only in deep low/no light.

It's a sensational bauble. Go get one or at least drop in and look at one and see what I mean.

(Later -- Adriana Cronin hits on a political angle on all this. And I agree with her about corporate complicity. All these bastards ought to be ashamed of themselves.)