Producer's Note 2: Shoot and Share

A little camera worthy of mention. The very small JVC Everio GZ-MC200 video camera.



The tapeless camera is designed for people who want to shoot and share images in much the same way as digital stills. The most obvious selling point is the size - makes shooting unobtrusive.

The controls take some getting used to but there's a broad range of options including manual operation. The camera functions very much like a stills camera and produces a series of numbered files which can be pre-viewed and organised/deleted in the viewfinder.

The files are designed to be transfered to a PC and used in conjunction with the supplied windows-only editing software. The camera produces MPEG2 files but with the extension .MOD. These can be changed to extension .mpg but the resulting files play without audio. There is a solution in the form of a programme called MPEG Streamclip which converts Mpeg files to a range of formats and sizes. However, to get the programme to work you will need to upgrade to Quicktime Pro , and then download an Mpeg-2 Playback Component plugin to go with it! Having done all this the routine is quite straight forward - clean the clip and edit.

The audio quality is very good - the unit is so silent that you don't get the usual rattling hum associated with DV Tape units. The quality of the images is good for domestic use but I wouldn't recommend them for professional media presentations. For web use and for educational presentations I think it will be an excellent tool. I'm thinking of using the camera to record some short talks to play in meetings and put on the our intranet site.