| Taking
the time to care for your video gear may seem
as thrilling as sorting your sock drawer, but
wait! Don't you lovingly sponge off your golf
club booties or rub nose oil on the joints of
your fishing rod or burnish the tips on your stamp
tweezers? Maintaining gear is less a chore than
a ritual tribute to the hobby it supports. And
if you reflect that replacing a lens can cost
more than a new camcorder, you can see why video
housekeeping's well worth the effort.
Camera
Care
Given
its delicate components and precise functions,
a hobbyist camcorder shouldn't last a month. Its
mechanisms rival a Swiss watch, its tolerances
are measured in microns, and dust, heat, water,
shocks and general negligence routinely mortify
it. Nevertheless, it usually works for years with
only minimal care.
That
care starts with the camera body. Clean it with
a microfiber cloth, just slightly dampened with
plain water or whatever cleaning agent your owner's
manual approves. Do not use any chemical not specifically
mentioned in that invaluable manual. Today's equipment
is fabricated from a combination of materials
ranging from titanium to recycled newsprint; you
never know when some benign kitchen solution will
wipe the lettering off your buttons or even melt
them down.
While
you're messing with buttons, open your camcorder's
on-screen menu tree and restore all controls to
their default settings. Depending on your unit's
make and model, some special settings (manual
focus, exposure compensation, high-speed shutter,
etc.) may remain in flash memory even after the
camera's shut down. The next time you shoot, they
can awaken and silently foul up your footage.
Though
some folks make a production out of cleaning the
tape transport, I do not. I view an open cassette
bay like the mouth of a short-tempered shark and
keep my fingers out of there. Mopping the interior
with cotton swabs and carbon tetrachloride is
not a job for civilians, so don't try this at
home.
Using
a head-cleaning cartridge is safe if you follow
the vendor's instructions, except for their recommended
intervals. Modern tapes don't shed much iron dandruff,
record and playback heads are delicate, and all,
yes, all, cleaning systems are at least mildly
abrasive. Unless you run a thriving wedding video
business, one or two head cleanings a year should
be about right. ( next column) |
Don't
forget your external LCD viewing screen. The panels
themselves are delicate and the plastic membranes
above them will actually distort if you push them
sideways, so clean them with great care. I like
lens cleaning solution and a microfiber cloth,
but again, follow your manual's directions.
Lens
Care
This
brings us to lens cleaning. Some micro-mini models
seal the actual lens behind a protective glass
(and often a snap-open lens cover, too). Other
units may expose the front lens element and provide
threads in front of it for adding protective or
color filters. Do not clean the lens with
your shirt sleeve or facial tissue!
With
either system, you should cherish whatever hunk
of glass faces the world by keeping it clean enough
for a surgical theater. Foreign pollutants and
abrasives like fingerprints, dust and salt spray
degrade the sharpness of your images; and in bright
sunlight, wide-angle shots can have such extreme
depth of field that spots on your lens are in
sharp focus.
If
your lens has filter threads, keep a transparent
filter (which will act like a lens cap) in place
at all times. That way, when the water skier you're
shooting splashes Great Salt Lake all over you,
a $20 filter is a painless sacrifice to protect
a $1,000 lens. This filter may be labeled "UV,"
"1A" or "skylight" (the difference
between these variants is meaningful only to the
film cameras for which they were originally designed).
Videotapes
Videotapes
need love too. Remove partly-recorded cassettes
from the camcorder and label them. Mini DV labels
are a trial for my 2nd-grader printing, so I usually
just write the date and the total elapsed footage
for reference when I next use the tape.
To
rewind or not to rewind? Rewind cassettes that
will be stored for long periods of time. But if
you plan to re-use a tape within a month or so,
leaving it at 41 minutes or wherever will save
a tedious search for blank tape and maybe prevent
taping over previous footage. (In the old VHS
days, wasting 20 minutes of unused tape cost practically
nothing; but digital tapes cost real money.) After
all these years, there is still no definitive
argument for shelving tapes standing or flat,
but most professionals bring cassettes to a full
upright position for storage.
While
we're in the neighborhood, let's repeat a point
we made earlier about preparing new tapes. You
should prepare future tapes by putting blank labels
on them so they're ready for instant use in the
heat of a shoot. |
Accessories
Batteries
are the subjects of another endless argument.
Engineers say they don't in fact have memories;
users snort, tell that to my batteries! Either
way, follow these tips to get the most out of
your power packs:
-
Keep
them warm before using them (in an inside
pocket works well if you're on the ski slopes)
for more efficient functioning.
-
Run
them all the way down in the camcorder, to
help defeat that memory effect that may or
may not exist.
-
Recharge
them immediately after use and then top them
up immediately before the next use.
-
Store
them outside the camcorder.
And
no matter how casual your shooting habits, invest
in at least one spare battery - personally I use
three in all (one in the camera and two in the
external charger).
We've
already mentioned the transparent lens cap "filter,"
which you leave on the camera, with the original
opaque cap clipped on the front of it. If you
also have a polarizer and/or neutral density filter,
nurture them too. Their original cases are fine
if you get the rigid plastic kind, but consider
screwing them together to form a stack. A screw-on
lens cap protects the top filter, and you can
still get female-threaded caps for some filter
sizes to protect the underside of the bottom filter.
If
you have a tripod, it's probably a lightweight
consumer model with a disconcerting tendency to
fall apart. In addition to cleaning it and spraying
a bit of lubricant, check the legs for loose or
missing pop rivets and repair them. And don't
forget the quick release, if your tripod has one.
One half is built onto the head, but where's its
mate on the camcorder, in a pocket someplace?
I mail-ordered in for a second camera-side release
plate for my tripod, and keep it in my gadget
bag for times when the original fails or turns
up missing.
When
you've buffed your gear to a spiffy condition,
keep it that way with a dedicated bag. Many shooters
like the traditional shoulder gadget bag, but
I prefer a hiker's fanny pack with belt-mounted
camera bags on each side. During a shoot, I rotate
the pack around to the front for easy access.
Remember that videographers are like fishermen;
we have society's permission to look absolutely
silly when festooned with our gear.
And
in my case, maintaining dignity's a lost cause
anyway. |
