[Ed: oops – no picture: just have to imagine it …]
I think the foreground camera is a Sony BVP-30p tube front end with a BVV-1 onboard Betacam recorder. The later BVV-5 Beta SP was a darker grey colour. Just guessing, but I think chip cameras were a fair bit later than plain old Betacam. The sound recordist next to him seems dis-interinterested in him, so BVP-30 man could be on hs own with camera mic.
The guy top right has a BVW-35 round his neck, or if he’s really unlucky it might be a BVU-110 (U-matic), or even worse, a 1” BVH-500. His long mic, a Sennheiser 805 or 815 in Rycote. No telling what that camera is, or who they are.
A nice frozen moment in time, though – quite nostalgic.
Graeme Wall
The guy top right might have a BVU-50, the record only version of the 110. Somewhat lighter to carry; both TVS and the regional BBC news camera crews in the south used them. 1” on news was quite rare.Ian Hillson
Beeb News used Ikegami with separate BVU recorders. ITN used Sony kit.Roger Long
Those early tube cameras and portable VTRs were really dreadful bits of kit, especially Sony. We preferred the Ike, it seemed slightly film like in its ergonomics.We had a conference weekend with Sony, in a plush hotel, a nice freebie, they even gave us a Sony branded Swiss army knife! We showed them a Nagra IV and a Arri Sr, also a SQN mixer. Still they came back with a ghastly compromise, even with the early chip Beta Cams. The Sony DigiBeta got somewhere near a good solution, it then all went tits up with the Sony PD150 and cheap and cheerful one man band ’self shooters’
For this I blame the BBC and its Community Affairs unit, which enabled a host of idiots to pick up camera and wobble.
I’m not nostalgic for all that!
We went backwards from crystal sync freedom ,and the ingenious Swiss Nagra to servitude and machine minding….
Nick Ware
Actually, on reflection, I feel the need to come out in defence of Sony. Right from the start, the Sony 330, and the on-the-shoulder camcorders that followed it, got the ergonomics pretty damn right. So much so that the Ikegami HL79A, 79D and HL95, plus all the Panasonic offerings, followed much the same basic layout. If that’s not a tribute, I don’t know what is! And if you look now at the current Sony models, the general layout of the PXW-X400 hasn’t changed much at all. Slap on a battery, bung in a tape (card), and off you go, even if the last time you saw one was 30 years ago!As I remember it, we all agreed at the time that Ikegami colorimetry had a nicer look, but that argument was about as pointless as saying Kodak was better than Agfa. I think if you showed Sony an Arri SR as the way to go, they would have been too polite to laugh at you, but inwardly would have done.
The PD150 was aimed at a completely different user/market. You can hardly blame Sony for the fact that the likes of the Beeb saw it as a way of doing away with ‘proper’ crewing. What the Beeb failed to recognise was that, OK, here’s a cheaper more basic camera, but you still need a skilled cameraman!
Where we have gone backwards is that whereas back then, the camera was self contained with the exception of the battery, you now get a body onto which you have to attach all manner of crap just to get it working.
Chris Woolf
I think that’s a fair defence.Sony (mainly) have been very good at producing cameras that were eminently portable and provided as good a picture ~at the time~ as was feasible. They have continued to do so, and in the right hands the pictures are frankly magnificent – beyond anything we dreamt of back in the old days. High class pictures by candle-light? Was never feasible in the past but can look magical now.
That users have wanted to employ the cameras with untrained and incompetent operators is not Sony’s fault. Moreover, as a company producing machinery, we can’t blame them (or Canon) for providing whatever the new style of customer demands.
We may moan at the way things are going – and I’m one who does because I can barely ever find anything in (so-called) film or TV that I want to watch, unless it was produced 20 or more years ago – but we also happily snap away with the cameras on our phones, using them for all manner of purposes in a way that would have been unthinkable in the days of a 2001. What’s more the damn things actually give quite good results
Bernie Newnham
I wrote this back in 2001. It was an article for the GTC magazine. Reading it again after a long time, it still seems to pretty much reflect the way things were and are.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I stopped being a BBC studio cameraman, and GTC member, 24 years ago, back when men were men etc, etc. For the next good, long time I minded my own business as a producer, sitting in edit suites and studio galleries, standing on grotty locations, and trying to learn how to type up my scripts, back in the office.
In late 1995,1 was asked to work on a show called “Morning Surgery” – Hospital Watch for a daily morning audience. The production had put in a budget of a million and a quarter pounds but had been told they could only have the quarter and they were looking for ways to get round this. I am the guilty person who specified the brand new DV as the answer to their prayers. I created the first BBC DV kit, now seen in their hundreds coming out of White City every day. I cut the foam innards with an electric carving knife in my kitchen, and when nobody in the resource departments would help, soldered up the first sound adaptors at my office desk. I taught science producers to do basic camera and sound, directed the shows and made some of the film inserts. “Morning Surgery” was hailed as a major technical triumph, and I’ve been lecturing on the fallout from it around the country and the world, ever since.
*So – why DV?*
I understand and sympathise with the criticisms from camera people in Zerb and elsewhere – mostly, they are absolutely right. But to get a proper sense of why, you have to take a much broader view. Let’s work from the top down….
We live in a market economy – most of us don’t rear chickens in our gardens on the best corn feed – we go down to Tescos and buy what’s cheap today. In turn, Tesco buy the cheapest they can get away with selling us – if they go too down market and we don’t buy, they adjust accordingly. Television is exactly the same.
If you are a satellite or cable company, you need product. You aren’t going to get subscribers if you offer a couple of extra channels; you need to offer a bountiful cornucopia of joys to suit all. You aren’t too bothered about what it consists of, so long as it sells and makes a profit. You bundle channels together, so that your punters have to buy as many bundles as possible to get what they want. To get Cartoon Network for my son, I have to buy about four other channels that I may dip into for about five seconds a week or less. It’s cheap, so I don’t worry. If it got expensive, I’d dump Cartoon Network.
If you are a programme providing company, you sell what you can, to whomsoever you can, for whatever profit you can make. As a very senior accountant at a major ITV company said to me, “carriage is all”. If they can sell their product to a cable or satellite company, and you and I buy it in our bundles, they are home free. It doesn’t matter whether we tune in or not – we’ve paid for the product. Cynical, isn’t it? But the difference between profit and disaster in this area is very narrow – see Mr Micawber – so the programming needs to be cheap.
You can see where we’re headed here…
You are a producer and are offered a long series of docs at £8,000 per half-hour, instead of £80,000, do you take it? Well, it depends – do you want to pay the mortgage or not? Of course you take it, and then you work out how to make it. The first thing you look at is what you can lose and still keep the customer happy – just like Tescos. You have heard about this DV stuff and seen some good results, so you pitch right in and dump your crews. They cost £800 a day, so that’s a decent start. A bit later on, you dump your editors too. If the results you provide please the customer, end of story. If not, you argue a lot and they either take their money elsewhere, or give you a bit more and see if things get better – Tescos again.
*Sadly for crafts people, they don’t set the standards, the market does – he who pays the piper etc. – and that’s it.*
In the UK, the BBC is in a slightly different, but similar situation to the commercial people. They cannot afford, if they are to survive, to be two channels amongst, say, 160. They have to make more product, but they have a fixed income. Yes, they can hack back on the bureaucrats, but programme costs still have to come down. Yes, presenters cost, but presenters sell shows and crews don’t. Yes, sometimes it looks pretty average to the professional eye but, if the customer – in this case a channel controller – is happy, then that’s that. The BBC and all TV companies are just like Tesco; they do the best they can for the money.
*There are other aspects to DV, at the programme making level..*
A good crew, or editor, is a joy and a bad one is a nightmare, but sometimes there’s just no substitute, no matter what. But, at the end of a shoot, the crew is off to the next one, whilst the director takes his rushes to the edit suite, in hope and trepidation, and carries that project through till it’s on the air. If he didn’t like what the crew provided, he can go elsewhere next time but, right now, it’s too late. Even the best of crews have to be looked after. They are human beings who are working for you and they need to be managed, one way or another. Take them away and, if you can do DV well enough to please the customer, it’s one less thing to worry about – you’re on your own, but you look down your own viewfinder, and hear what you are putting onto the tape – there are no surprises, good or bad. You work for as many hours as you want, and as many days as you want. Sometimes you have to work in delicate situations, and two people from the TV company are far less intimidating than four or five – or fourteen (in the old ITV days).
*The whole DV thing can be very liberating, if you can do it.*
Which brings me to training, or the lack of it. It’s true that quite often a researcher, who has done a two-day course and then turns out wince-making results, is replacing a cameraman with many years of experience. This seems stupid and, if it were a fair world, it wouldn’t happen. But it’s not, it’s market driven and all the professional standards in the world aren’t going to make a difference. The customers choose – first the channel controller, then the viewer – not the camera crew. But the days of rubbish results are hopefully numbered. More and more often, when shows take their staff on, they want them DV experienced, and want to see proof. So colleges are beginning to turn out people who can do what’s needed – a different kind of person is beginning to make television, multi-skilled and pretty comfortable with it.
*Where does all this leave the traditional camera crew?*
Well, if it’s holding a very expensive Beta kit, I’m sorry. Change isn’t going away – so if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. There’s a huge shortage of cameramen who don’t insist on bringing macho sized kit and attitudes to the party. A DV camera at £2,000 is almost identical to a Digibeta at £40,000 – it’s not as good, but it’s not a twentieth of the quality, and it has its own very clear advantages – for example, have you ever done a two-camera shoot in a London taxi? Why not dry hire yourself without your kit, and don’t whinge on about prostituting your art, just because you are holding a VX1000 – it’s the story that matters, and you can help to tell it. Do you want to pay the mortgage or not?
Nick Ware
And now (31 Dec 2018), nearly 20 years into the 21st Century, I find myself doing mostly corporate work. A typical setup will be two Canon C300 Mk2 cameras, that camera being such a contraption I have to build them every time. Invariably we shoot the same size all the way through, but on 4k so that the editor can re-frame in Post. Cfast cards are so expensive that we have to carry a laptop and portable HDDs to copy the material off for the client. At 4k that can waste an hour after the shoot finishes, longer than the de-rig itself takes. Mostly, the client is in the US, doing the interview over FaceTime. We wrap, do the copying, then have to find a FedEx pickup point to send the HDD overnight. Oh, and on top of all that, there’s the mp3 to upload.Oh for the days when we just popped the tape and handed it over, then walked away. That’s the nostalgic bit!
But hey, the money’s good, so keep it coming!
