They don’t make ‘em like they used to. I’ve acquired a lot of different cameras over the years and most of them end up sitting in storage once they’ve been replaced. I used to spend hours editing tape-to-tape back in the days before capture cards, stacks of S-VHS and M2 tapes, then once non-linear editing arrived I’d spend hours digitising tapes onto the hard drive, and then finally I moved to digital card-based DSLR cameras and I thought I was finished with tapes.
But it’s funny how time changes things, and here I am wading into the old-school tech once again to resurrect some old projects and maybe even give some old cameras one last outing before they finally succumb to the ravages of time. Nothing lasts for ever and an analogue video camera is no exception.
I’ve got a bunch of different examples stacked in boxes and camera bags, with at least one model from each of the main consumer formats and some of them are still surprisingly capable despite their low resolution capture.
The challenges of shooting with these old cameras are mostly caused by a lack of modern niceties. You don’t get things like histograms, focus peaking or crisp lcd monitors on these old cameras, in fact for something like this Canonvision VM-E2 you don’t even get a colour viewfinder let alone a useable focus screen. Flick it into ‘auto focus’ and hope for the best.
I’m very curious to see how the footage holds up against more modern cameras, even a cheap mobile phone will probably have a better sensor than one of these old machines, but there is still something to be said for taking a stroll down memory lane and in this age of Terrabyte micro-sd cards and 128,000iso sensors running 8k resolution it’s weirdly refreshing to have nothing but an old analogue camera with a ccd and a spool of magnetic tape in the camera bag. I wonder how long it will be before I remember why I upgraded in the first place? :)
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