For years I had been creating photos for my web sites with a standard camera and a scanner. Since this process has its obvious drawbacks (long waiting periods, developing costs, stacks of pictures), at the beginning of this year we decided to invest in a more efficient method. The obvious choice was to get a digital camera. Luckily, I happened to visit an artist friend here in Berlin who convinced me to get a videocam and video card instead of a digital camera and then capture all the pictures I wanted from the video. That's exactly what we did and two months later I can say the our little Sony HandyCam was one of the best investments for web development we have ever made.

We opted for an analog videocam instead of the more expensive digital video cameras. Digital video cameras record their video on the same tapes as analog cameras -- image that -- and since we are going to use our videos to capture images for mere 70 ppi web graphics, we couldn't justify the jump in price to digital just yet.
The camera has the standard look-through eye-piece as well as the little color window panel that flips out to the left. We find that we usually use this little panel as you can conveniently watch what you are recording as if you were watching TV avoiding that ol' Clark Griswald stiff neck. However, we do use the eye-piece when the batteries are low or if we are filming in the dark -- the infrared shots can have an nice, eerie or even "top-secret" look, might be nice for an appropriate web project.

The battery lasts for two hours of filming time which is practical and convenient for most daily outings, workshops, company filmings, etc. If you need more, you can buy a 16-hour battery for about $150. Amazing.

Instead of an internal Hauppauge video/TV capture card, we opted for the slightly more expensive USB External Fast Clip Master. This allows us to be fully portable, plugging camera and Clip Master into any computer and digitizing videos on site. The Clip Master even gave us a pleasant surprise in America where we couldn't show our videos on TVs because our European VideoCam is PAL and American TVs are NTSC. Our Clip Master, however, was able to play our videos on any PC, nicely sidestepping that annoying little intercontinental PAL / NTSC incompatability.

Digitizing long videos with ClipMaster is simply a matter of pressing a button and coming back an hour later to find a one gigabyte MPG video file on your hard drive. To capture pictures, simply open the video with the free Windows Media Player and advance to any frame in the one-hour video like, press ALT-Print to capture the screen and then CTRL-V it into your favorite graphics program, where you can manipulate it to your heart's content.

I keep discovering advantages of using a video camera over other methods of generating web images. For instance, while standing on top of Pikes Peak this summer, I panned more than 180 degrees of beautiful Colorado landscape. Later with my graphics program I was able to piece together those shots back into a beautiful mountain panorama. You could do this with a digital camera too, of course, but then you have to deal with the sharp color differences on the edges of the individual shots, especially when bright sunlight is involved. The shots from the video on the other hand blend nicely together.

And here is another killer feature of image capturing with video. Have you ever tried to get a group of 25 or more people to all smile and look at the camera at the same time? Add a couple active kids and it's nearly impossible. With a videocam, however, you film the group for one solid minute from a stationary position all the while telling your best jokes and yelling the kids names so that at least once during that minute, every single adult and child has looked at the camera and smiled. Later on your computer, you can cut and paste heads until you have a composite of the best moments of each person in one picture. You would be surprised how seemslessly you can cut and paste faces and heads when the pictures are from a constant, steady video film.
Recording a minute of someone talking will give you a choice of about 1000 facial expressions with minute variations to choose from. Film a bird landing or a dog running and you can later choose just the right motion shot.

Sometimes when I am out and about in town, I take my light videocam along in its nice carrying case and film up various objects which I could later use for web design: a traffic light here, a cool architecture shot there, a nice river shot, a perfect leaf shimmering in the sun, a busy street corner, you never know what you could later use. A library of royalty-free web photos is a nice to have. So that I can later find the photo shots in my videos again quickly, I watch the video once, typing in titles and the time positions of where they are located in the video. This way I can find picture I need later in seconds. Very nice.