i never own or touch a camcorder until March of 2002. That was the first time i bought a camcorder.
My first experience with it was short. i just record like a couple minutes of video of my family and watch it on tv and was very please with the picture quality. the sharpness and color wow me.
Teacher wanted students to make a video assignment that is why i bought a camcorder. i wasn\'t really planning on buying one that time, i was thinking of getting one like a year or so later but because the teacher didn\'t let me borrow his and i wasn\'t interested in my uncle vhs analog camcorder because the low end picture quality. so that is why i bought a digital 8 camcorder.
Anyway, so when i made the video assignment. it was frustrating than i thought. i had to deal with kids because they are kids. my nephew broke a fan that was use for like decoration. i had to staple it back together. even i had trouble giving them directions how or what to act or do so i can record them.
Luckily i borrowed the story "the lady or the tiger" so i have one less difficulty to write my own story.
One of the other frustrations i had was zooming in and out of the picture. the zoom button on the camcorder is like mediocre, i had to push the slide button, move up or down the slide button and it can be frustrating. sometimes it zoom in too fast which if you shake the camera while holding it, the picture will look really shaking. imagine zooming in then zoom out too fast too. makes it difficult to pay attention to simple picture.
But there are moments where i didn\'t use the zoom and i didn\'t shake the camera, and some kids can act nicely on the scene which makes it look cool.
oh yeah, the wind is another factor. sometimes you couldn\'t hear what the kids are saying because of the wind blowing and it could be a distraction. luckily i use the voice dub or voice over which can be fun. i just remove original soundtrack and dub over the voice with the kids recording the voices into a seperate microphone that was recorded into a computer. luckily the sound quality of a microphone is high quality so the sound comes out very nice.
so, what was your experience with a camcorder like? especially your first experience with it? sorry for this long post.