Daniel Sato

TL;DR: Everything the HDSLR can do, it does leaps and bounds better than an HD camcorder. HD camcorders can do things that HDSLR’s simply cannot do. Important things.

I like to think that video is one of the things that we do well at The News Journal. From what I’m told, we are among the top fifteen for video plays among Gannett properties (90+ daily newspapers and 23 television stations) and among the top five when comparing newspapers alone. Back when Gannett papers first started to shoot video, the company purchased video kits in bulk to equip all of their papers. I am not sure exactly when this happened, but I did use the kit back in 2007 when I was interning at the St. Cloud Times.

Fast forward four years and the Sony HVR A1U I currently use is a Frankenstein amalgamation of parts from fallen A1U’s. You can imagine how I felt when I heard that we may soon be ordering replacements to the trusty A1U. Initially, I thought that what we ordered as a replacement would be a no-brainer. As a still photographer, I obviously wanted an HDSLR. I wanted the low-light performance, the vibrant color and, of course, the shallow depth-of-field. It was around this time that I bought a 7D to use for some of my projects at work. Six months of HDSLR use later, and I’m honestly not sure I would recommend purchasing HDSLR’s to replace our A1U’s.

That is not to say that my 7D is without merit. It is an amazing camera. The color is great, the image is sharper than anything I will ever get out of an A1U and there is nothing quite like attaching a 300mm 2.8 lens and shooting video. With the 7D, I am a much more versatile journalist. If I am shooting both stills and video, I can do so with one less piece of equipment. If I am using the A1U, I can use my 7D as a second camera to record cutaways while also shooting stills. Even when I am only shooting video, still screengrabs from the 7D video can be used in the newspaper and are virtually indistinguishable from a still image.

If newspapers cared only about producing beautiful, cinematic pieces, choosing what to purchase wouldn’t be a choice at all. The reality is, newspapers care about numbers and money. According to the numbers, our video traffic is driven by breaking news and high school sports. When shooting breaking news, the A1U can be operated with one hand, leaving my other hand free to hold a stick mic for interviews. For sports, The A1U’s auto focus lets me follow a play if it moves down the field, approaches me or moves away from me. And for both news and sports, the A1U’s 10x zoom allows me to cover the focal range of at least two lenses if I were shooting with my 7D. It would be impossible for me to shoot a long drive at a football game without missing the running back if he ran down the sideline I was shooting on, or to go from a shot of traffic backed up to a wide shot of an accident using my 7D (not to mention trying to zoom smoothly without a rig and a follow focus). As for the money, purchasing a Rebel T3 with a kit lens sounds great at $500 – $600 (we upload our video at 720p already). However, considering that we couldn’t repair a 70-200 until it literally broke in half, I’m not sure how many new ones we would be able to purchase to go along with the T3′s (and it definitely isn’t as effective on a day to day basis with only an 18-55 3.5-5.6).

Could not have been shot with my 7D:

In the end, an HD camcorder makes sense for the types of stories that drive the most traffic at our paper, though I do think that we should have one or two HDSLR’s available when shooting longer projects and feature stories.

Gotta keep my mom updated on what I’ve been doing!

50 Who Matter is a series that we do twice a month that profiles someone working to improve their community. Despite its recurring nature, we typically shoot it all in one day. In this instance, I was given two days to shoot, and I think it made a huge difference. Initially, it was going to be like most other 50 Who Matter’s … shoot interviews and whatever broll I can get in an our or two, and then scrounge for additional broll using archive footage. I wasn’t going to shoot any broll at the all-star game because it was on a Saturday, and we prefer to have everything done by Friday (video publishes on Sunday). In order to assuage the fears of my editors, I put together a version on Friday that could go up if I didn’t have to to re-edit for some reason on Saturday. Having completed my interviews during media day for the high school football all-star game, I had a better sense of what scenes I needed to shoot the day of the game and had everything I needed before the start of the game.

As it is the Fourth of July, I thought it only appropriate to share some relevant videos. The fireworks video was the second of two assignments that I had within an hour of each other, both of which required photos and video (something that is happening with increasing frequency these days).

Learning how to code has been on my to-do list ever since I started this blog back in 2005. In those six years I have learned enough html and css to put together a standard website from scratch, and just enough jQuery and JavaScript to take other people’s code and alter it for my use (as can be seen on my new landing page) … but I have yet to fully grasp programming languages such as Ruby and Python. I bought all of the books and have watched countless tutorials, and of course everything makes sense as you follow along. It is the point when it is then my turn to create a project that I run into trouble.

Enter Scratch. Scratch is a visual programming language developed by MIT to teach children the basics of coding. It utilizes commands in the form of puzzle pieces that fit together with descriptions on them in plain English, as opposed to syntax that may be difficult to understand for the true beginner. Scratch serves as the bridge between a general understanding of concepts such as loops, conditionals and variables, and the ability to write code in a text-based editor. It has already helped me to understand concepts in other languages that gave me trouble when I was simply reading them in a book. For example, I was attempting to create a basic slideshow using play, pause, next and previous buttons, but kept running into a problem of the buttons not responding to commands. After some trial and error, I realized that the background on the stage was independent of the code I was writing in the function for the button. Instead, I had to return out something when that button was clicked that the stage could hear, and then, once that occurred, I could then change the background to the next image. I think (but am not sure) that this is the same as having global and local variables and what takes place in a function is independent of other functions so you would need to return out a value in order to use it elsewhere.

As a photographer, I process many things visually. In this respect, Scratch is perfect … all of my commands and actions sit in a library on the left, and I can drag and drop them around to see changes in real time. Just how far Scratch will take me, I do not know, but the idea of visual programming has been catching on, and services such as Yahoo Pipes (scraping/aggregating data) and Waterbear (Javascript) will only continue to grow.

One of the things that I love most about being a journalist is that I do things that I would never do under normal circumstances. Attending a NASCAR race is just such a thing, and yet, there I was at Dover International Speedway, running around from turn to turn trying to catch all of the action.

The level of noise definitely exceeded my expectations. The first time the door opened to the press room and I didn’t have my ear protection on, I was in shock. It is deafening. I had always assumed that NASCAR was like baseball in a way … that people went to hang out, eat some hot dogs and watch sporadic moments of action when they occur, but I learned that the sheer volume of the cars as they go around the track makes conversation pretty much impossible, and I imagine most make do with listening to radio chatter in their headsets as they watch the race.

We had three photographers at the race. One was stationed up high on turn one, looking down at the start/finish line, and two others (myself and a freelancer) who were free to roam the track. At around the three hundredth left turn I realized that NASCAR is much better on television, with multiple camera angles and that everyone at the event, myself included, was really just there to see a crash.