Count Your Many Digital Blessings

Many of you already are taking advantage of this hot and somewhat new firewire technology when it comes to maximizing video in youth ministry on a minimum budget. Digital camcorders, both in the mini DV format and the Digital8 format, come equipped with firewire as a standard feature. Getting your hands on one of these Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Chip wonders is step one in the acquire-the-firewire process.

By capturing your youth ministry footage on these digital camcorders, you're then ready to take step two, which is having something to connect to the other end of your firewire cable. That something, for most of us, is usually a video capture card or firewire port on a laptop or desktop computer. Now the digital fun really begins, because the data (in this case, audio and video) flying through the firewire cable is digital, just like data on a floppy disk, so there's no loss of sound and picture quality when you copy data from one firewire device to another. Generation loss (the inevitable and disturbing loss of picture quality when copying one non-digital videotape to another ala VHS to VHS) is a thing of the past--sooooo 20th century.

With your digital camcorder and firewire capture card, you can import only the video clips you want into your computer, edit them together with any one of dozens of computer-based software/hardware configurations available on the Mac, PC or a dedicated turn-key editing system, output your masterpiece back to digital tape via your beloved firewire connection/cable and, voila! You have positioned yourself squarely in the epicenter of digital nirva…uh...heaven. Your Oscar-nominated production can be played back from the same digital camcorder on which it was shot directly to a video projector which, if equipped with firewire (more and more projectors are being manufactured with a firewire connection), will display your world premiere in the exact digital quality in which it was captured. Even if your projector doesn't have firewire, you still benefit immensely by maintaining the firewire connection through the entire production process up to that point. Here's a projection tip: use the SVHS (super VHS) video connection (which all digital video cameras have) to play back your digital video to the projector. (All projectors manufactured in the past few years have an SVHS video connection.) Your picture quality, though not as pristine as digital, will still be much improved over the standard RCA (composite) video connections.

This Just in… on a Related Firewire News Front

While we're all in the acquire-the-firewire mood, let's just go ahead and invest in a couple of those always-gettin'-cheaper 60, 80 or even 160 gig firewire hard drives. Make sure they're at least 5400 rpms if you're going to use them to play back and/or edit digital video; 7200 rpms is even better. Hard drives, firewire or otherwise, slower than 5400 rpms aren't fast enough to support the playback and/or editing of digital video. (Trivia Fact #87: five minutes of digital video in the .avi format takes up one gig of hard drive space.)

Here's another firewire tip: Even though somewhere earlier I mentioned that firewire devices (hard drives, printers, etc.) can be plugged in and out without powering down your computer, don't just yank the firewire cable from its computer port. Click on the "stop firewire device" feature/icon found along the bottom of your Windows desktop, which will allow you to remove firewire devices safely, guilt-free and without locking up your system. 

Now, a final word to any laggards out there…put your hands in the air and slowly step away from the 8mm silent home movie projector!