CANDID CHIMERA
The indoor video home movie, with sound! I should have known. That will be it, for a while, anyhow. We'll do our best to make our own TV, just like on the tube--it's the television age, isn't it? And TV is an indoor sport. Besides, the new video cameras can practically see in the dark, and they work well in the living room, right next to the hi-fi.
All this struck me forcefully, a few days back, when I went to a friendly Saturday night party, in a home where I had often been before, and walked, all unknowing, right into the middle of such a video movie. Moreover, the equipment was fresh new, bought the day before, and our host was about to try it out on us. What luck! Just my usual kind.
Now, this account is mildly doctored to protect anonymity, etc., but the audio and the video of it are true-to-life and might even be instructive if you are buying your own video equipment the day after tomorrow. Remember, we are all beginners in this new game, and especially in the audio. We'll be making a new set of amateur bloopers as we try to mate the sound and the pictures. Things will go startlingly wrong, but it will be interesting--and more so as the technique begins to work itself out.
So imagine the scene. The host is an ample Santa Claus type: Gorgeous frowze of gray whiskers and flying hair, cherubic face. He's nuts on showbiz (hence the video equipment, of course), but it's mostly platonic; he tends to silently mime along with recordings of celebrities doing show songs-you know the style. The splendid ex-factory loft he calls an apartment indicates a nice income from somewhere, no doubt a plebeian business, but his home is his stage and showbiz his dream. At parties the folks often gather 'round the spinet piano and bellow Cole Porter et al. (while Canby cringes inconspicuously in a far corner). Or else the show tunes come out of the hi-fi system, just the kind you'd expect--LP, CD, cassette, radio tuner, VCR, big TV monitor, and speakers (typically inadequate), artfully hid den somewhere out of the way. The sound never stops. The VCR shows endless TV or movies, but, oddly, what we usually hear is FM radio-a zany mixture, and who cares? It's all part of the sonic decor, which is just as important as the furniture. Against all this racket, people talk--or rather, shout.
So this time I walk in as usual and am instantly lost. The portable room dividers have been moved again. But instantly my grinning host grabs my arm and steers me left, into a new space next to the kitchenette where the big TV monitor now sits on a table. A lot of people are on the screen, milling around. Some show or other, I think, and plenty distorted-normal Manhattan reception. I turn away but he nudges me and points again. Oops you can guess. That toad-like body with the bright green head is my own.
Short, fat and wide. When I move let, the toad on the tube moves right. We are on camera.
Now, I trust our manufacturers will not take umbrage; the video faults I am now describing are 90% those of technique. We do not yet have the ideal and ultimate consumer video camera, but I quickly discovered that my host's model, a camcorder (with VCR built into the camera) was very far ahead of the simple camera I tried some years ago. The result was grotesque be cause the operator was a beginner.
The toad-like distortion, a disproportion between horizontal and vertical, was, I think, merely the camera angle.
Note that it did not occur to the owner to walk about with camera in hand, or to change location; he set it off to one side and a bit high, some dozen feet from the TV monitor, and there it stayed, with built-in mike. Okay for a start, but he'll have to do better. As for the green heads, I spotted the cause in a moment. The camera hadn't seen enough illumination, so the word LIGHT had appeared on the monitor in large letters. All accommodating, our friend obliged by turning on a bank of white fluorescent tubes directly over the heads of those on camera! That did it. Fluorescent light is rich in greens, and video's automated color balancing is very touchy. This was too much; the balancer turned every pink head a bright green.
The fluorescents went off, the monitor again said LIGHT, and we turned on a number of ordinary, discreetly distant incandescent lights around the big space until the LIGHT went out. Still a comfortable illumination, in fact just right for a party, nothing to glare and blind you, and the colors were now accurate.
But what of the "movie," and especially the audio? People were still coming in, being startled to see them selves; the rest of us moved to other business, mainly loud talk. The camera had made its ploy; now we forgot it.
Were we supposed to stand there like lumps, looking at our toady selves? So the music played, the talk rose up, people blocked the front of the monitor or stood in the camera's way so that only a fuzzy shoulder or arm showed what a waste of good equipment! Ah, but our host had further ideas.
The camera, all this time, was recording. After a while, he would play it back for us-with audio. During recording, of course, there was no sound from the system; there would have been feed back. But on playback we would not only see but hear. All those priceless remarks being made, right and left.
What a bust. The playback was good for maybe two minutes of our undivided attention because the sound, picked up from the distant mike on the camera, in a large and quite live room, was totally unintelligible. It was a loud buzz of meaningless voices with fuzzy off-mike music (the loudspeakers) in the middle of it. Nothing else.
The fact is that a show is a show, and this one might have been okay if there had been words to listen to-one or two voices in an intelligible close-up, or some way of picking out voices in the crowd so that there would be continued interest. But if the sound has no message, the pictures are spoiled.
End of Part II in our friend's rapid video education.
He was amiably undaunted; he had more up his sleeve. Seems that long before we arrived he had set up his camera, pulled his stage curtains (next to the kitchen sink) and put down a big solo act for our later entertainment, as the climax of the evening. With pride he whispered to me ahead of time that it was 40 minutes long. (I groaned inwardly--didn't I tell you that this medium affords too much time?) Accordingly, late in the evening there was a knocking for attention, then clapping, and the Big Show started.
Complete, of course, with audio. I'll have to hand it to this amiable showbiz fan in terms of the visuals.
Some of us, we find, are poison to the camera, no matter how distinguished we may look in real life. Others are simply TV naturals. On camera, they blossom, they are more than real.
When our hero came forth from behind his own curtains, walked forward to a head-and-shoulders close-up (automatic focus) and smiled a greeting, there was a real hush. This man had it, and knew it. That infectious magnetism! Even more than in the flesh itself.
But then came the sound.
The music swelled up in the back ground (out of the hi-fi system) and he began to speak, with that ingratiating and attractive face. A tiny mouse-squeak could faintly be heard: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to .. . " and there was no more, though the visuals went on. We could understand not a word-the "back ground" music was too loud, and the mike on the camera was much too distant for such a speech. After three or four minutes of visually persuasive but inaudible speech, our host knew he was licked and something had to be done, fast. Forty minutes of this? In another three he would have lost his whole audience.
So he did exactly what you would do. He slipped quickly over to the camcorder and grabbed fast forward, to skip violently ahead and maybe locate a few highlights before he lost us.
And thereby we discovered an unexpectedly hilarious feature of this and perhaps other new camcorders.
Now, you understand, many VCRs, especially older ones, have a fast for ward and reverse in which the picture turns into a temporary nightmare of vague flying figures and wild streaks and flashes of light. (The sound is mercifully turned off in most.) When the VCR is in the fast mode, we try not to look, or endure the violence with what patience we can muster until speed returns to normal. But this camcorder, with VCR built in, is different. The fast forward is slower, I think, maybe two or three times normal. But what is astonishing is that the picture remains serene and absolutely unaltered, just much faster. Even the sound disappears and returns smoothly, with no audible clunks or bumps.
So our friend started to skip, and on the monitor he started to run. As I say, he is a bit of a Santa Claus in size and here he was more, thanks to that toad- like foreshortening. The instant he pushed the fast-forward control, we burst into laughter. He would talk a moment (soundlessly), then suddenly scuttle madly around the room like some demented groundhog, bless his soul. Then, as suddenly--back to normal speed, as smooth as butter. It was the hit of the evening, and we got through it all in 10 minutes, not 40.
I should note that he did much better in the "mime" parts of his little show, if perhaps by lucky accident. The recorded music, out of that pair of stereo speakers at the far end of the room, was at least fairly loud, just right for his silent "singing" along with the recorded voices, in good lip-sync. That part of his show worked fine, even if the music was unthinkable by hi-fi standards, recorded from speakers at much too great a distance--25 feet or so in that big space. He'll learn to do better. All in good time.
I'll have to throw in a note on the video auto-focus feature since it has so much importance in making the audio meaningful and effective. When those expressive whiskers came into view on the tube and moved easily forward to head and shoulders, sharply in focus, it was the automation that did it, smoothly and suitably blurring the background. With such an excellent picture, a good close-up sound for the voice would have been really persuasive, up to any professional job. This focus automation is immensely improved from a few years back, when it tended to hunt, hysterically, unable to make up its mind what to focus on. No more! Now it is smooth as silk, unobtrusive--a matter of operating parameters. But I note one caution. If in such a close-up you momentarily back away a few feet, or even sway sidewise off-camera, the automation may lose you-your face goes into a total blur and the kitchen sink emerges in all its stark clarity. Disconcerting, and it happened just that way to our friend. To be focused upon, you must fill a certain proportion of the picture. So stay put.
And--somehow--get that mike up close and the audio level right! The camera can zoom but the audio can't, unless you remove the mike and carry it forward in the old-fashioned way.
That's a liability. Wouldn't it be nice, it occurs to me, to have an automated sound zoom, directly coupled to the auto-focus? Indeed, it does seem possible, if expensive. We have long had variable-pattern professional mikes, re mote-controlled; could such a device be automated to tie in with the video focus, at an "affordable" cost? It could solve a large part of the audio problem in home video. This and other new ideas for miking are likely to get much attention and R&D before we hitch our consumer sound unfailingly to video.
So--enjoy, and learn as you enjoy.
There's plenty of entertainment to come in this area, once we put good sound to good images.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Mar. 1986)
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