I’m just travelling back from a sort of mini launch of Canon product at Byron Bay. A mini-launch as the products themselves were announced back in November last year, but over these last two days we (a pack of journos) managed to actually have a play with a consumer camcorder, the Legria HFM 40 and the prosumer XA10.

When I say play, I had much more exposure to the ’40 than the ’10; to get used to the feel of the camera, we (being the journalists broken into teams of 4), were assigned a task. In my team’s case, we had to create some still shots (using a Canon 600D) to illustrate an advertising campaign for the local council (fictitious of course!), and also shoot a commercial showing the delights of the local area including the beaches, restaurants, shopping, lifestyle, art and so on. This commercial was to last a maximum of 90 seconds and use the camera facilities only; that is all editing, titling etc had to be done in camera, and a further condition was that each scene had to use one of the in-camera effects (sepia, vivid, B & W, ‘old movie’, historic and so on).

The aim was to show how easy this could be for the average person who simply doesn’t want to go to the expense of buying extra editing software, learn it, have to download from the camera, re-render to DVD and so forth and so on.

The actual task was interesting. As the only ‘video-phyte’ in our team – the rest were pro still photographers – I was given the task to create the commercial. To do this, I spent a couple of hours being chauffeured around the locale in a stretch limo (noice!) to shoot beaches,, lighthouses, historic buildings etc and then another 90 minutes wondering the main thoroughfares of Byron shopping/restaurant/coffee shoppe precinct.

You certainly see some weird sights in Byron.

As an aside, the next day when we were given an hour’s free time, one of our group, JJ from news.com.au suddenly stood bolt upright from his chair pointing to the main street exclaiming “what the F—k is THAT?”. We could see nothing, but JJ insisted he had seen a giant chipmunk! We wondered about the type of coffee being served at this particular café, until lo and behold, a giant chipmunk DID stroll past! True to form, as the on-the-ball journos we were, no-one thought to take a photo as we were all too gob smacked. We never did work out why the streets of Byron are inhabited with giant chimpunks.

Thankfully, most of the locations I shot were quite amenable to what I was doing. The exception was art galleries, jealous of the copyright of their prints, and I was chased from a couple. Another team’s member was verbally abused apparently!

At one point, while shooting through a pot of beer to get an effect in a local beer garden, the waft of wacky-baccy was very strong. Personally I find the smell sickly and horrible, so I bolted pretty poste haste not also wishing to take any chances of being in the vicinity in case the local constabulary came a-visiting!

Once our shooting time as up, it was back to Studio Central (a function room at a Byron motel) to edit, assemble and title the video into some semblance of order. This proved to be easier said than done.

To be fair, documentation was thin on the ground, and for the Canon support staff in place to help us, they had only had very limited access to the cameras themselves so the adaption of the in-camera software became a learning curve for all. In my case, I could have easily have downloaded the clips to Sony Vegas on my laptop I had with me, cut and diced the 30 odd usable clips, added titling, re-rendered and been finished within 45 minutes or so. I knew the theme I wanted and this would have been easy. But also against the rules. There was therefore no choice but to grapple with the in-camera software.

So could a new user jump into this task with confidence. This is actually a difficult question to answer believe it or not. For someone like me, it was not easy, simply as I have a set way of thinking how the process of editing works, and the way the in-camera process is handled is utterly alien to that way and more than once had me scratching my head. Why for example, when I ‘divided’ a clip to get subclip from a specific start and end point, did I get three new clips and not just the bit I wanted? And when adding a title to a clip, why did I need to press ‘record’ to place the title on the clip?

To someone who had never edited any other way and had bothered to read the manual, this may seem totally natural of course, but if you are a seasoned editor in any of the major consumer packages (Pinnacle, Sony Vegas Movie Studio, Adobe Premiere Elements etc) you’ll be cursing and ranting within minutes I promise you.

What of the camera itself however? In-camera editing aside, it was actually very easy to use. Adding filters was as simple as selecting from an on-screen menu (complete with a brief description) in conjunction with a joystick-like affair and a finger scrolling. Images were very crisp and clean shot in hi-def using AVCHD, the de-facto format today. Audio was bright and if I had any criticism, it is my old bugbear of no viewfinder. Simply in the bright sun of Byron, especially down the beach, some shots were simply hit and miss as I could not see the framing at all.

The documentation we had was not a proper manual, but a double sided four-up photocopy of the US manual (the only change apparent was the reference to NTSC). I am not sure if this was a beta version of the manual as in the index for example, there was no reference to “Titling’, ‘Music’ (the camera has a number of inbuilt track you can add as well as themes, backgrounds and so on) or even ‘DVD’.

Reading the manual linearly also showed the documentation had a tendency to jump all over the place with for example, ’Viewing Photos’ followed by ‘External Connections’. As I say, maybe this is a beta manual and these glitches will be fixed as Canon documentation is normally very good.

The exercise as a whole was valuable. Too many ‘reviews’ of anything from cameras to computers are done in a more test bench way than as the unit will, be used in real life by real consumers. Certainly the editing operation picked up what I might consider flaws in the procedure, but someone who has never driven a manual car could say the same thing as an automatic only driver.  “Why would you …?” could be the question of the day under these circumstances.

For a very good camcorder, lack of viewfinder besides, this situation just needs to be known. If you are used to another editing package and have it available, it becomes a non-issue; if you have never edited, you need to make sure you read the manual thoroughly. Simple as that.

By David Hague

David is the owner and publisher of AusCam Online. He has a background in media dating back to 1979 when he first got involved with photojournalism in motorsport, and went from there into technology via a 5 year stint with Tandy Computers. Following that, he ran a software distribution company on the Gold Coast and was one of the first to recognise the potential of Microsoft Windows.

Moving back to WA, David wrote scripts for Computer Television for video training for the just released Windows and Office 95 among others, and was then lured to Sydney to create web sites for the newly commercial Internet in 1995, building hundreds of sites under contract to OzEmail including Coates Hire, Hertz Queensland, John Williamson, the NSW Board of Studies and many, many more.

He went back into full time journalism as the Managing Editor for Channel 7's 'Gadget Guy', Peter Blasina's publications VideoCamera and Pixelmag, before starting Australasian Camcorder magazine when these publications were shelved. He lives at Sydney's Avalon Beaches nearly on the ocean front with dog Budweiser and in his spare time is a nut for motor sport, road safety, fishing, science fiction - especially Dr Who - and technology.

David can be contacted via david@auscamonline.com