LESSON & LEARN
In palmier days, one of my favorite categories in this department was called Oddities and Endities. Re served for short items, it is occasionally resurrected when the need is pressing-as it is now. My first oddity will be short and not very sweet. I fell on my face numerically in the March issue. In speaking of FM and TV channels, I produced wrong figures to illuminate a perfectly good point-not a wise procedure, I readily admit. My sin was that I thought I knew, like the phone number you so confidently dial, only to get somebody who promptly hangs up on you. I had it wrong, though my point was right.
Yes, TV or video is indeed "voracious" as to bandwidth, compared to any FM or other purely audio signal for the consumer. But the complete FM band, all the stations we can hear, occupies not one but a bit over three TV channels. So my multiplication of the wrong figure tripled the fault. No, we wouldn't have "more than 1,000" FM outlets if FM were to replace all the low-number TV channels. But still, we'd have an awful lot. The ratio between FM and TV bandwidth per channel is thus very roughly 3:100-not an exact figure but a revealing one, I hope. I must repeat that this disproportion be tween audio-only and video is of great importance in the swiftly developing interplay between audio equipment and video-plus-audio.
Yes, too, we can hear TV sound off the end of the FM band, as I know from listening. Only at one end, though. FM is plonked in the middle of the TV numbers, between channels 6 and 7, but there is aviation stuff and such attached at one end, between FM and TV. Now I hope I have things in hand.
My principal interest in March, of course, was in the extraordinary lack of television technique, in the artistic sense, in the early proto-broadcasts during the war years, as I know from my own fascinated observation. Understandable! It was the Beginning. But doesn't anyone but me remember those broadcasts? Perhaps not, since the number of receivers available was close to nil, probably fewer than the FM sets that had been so vigorously promoted by Major Armstrong. (I re member that we counted on some 400 FM receivers in the entire New York City area.) Practically nobody, the technicians excepted, ever saw that first television on regularly scheduled public air. I was lucky, as usual by sheer happenstance, to have been one of the few.
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I do hope to live long enough to try out the ultimate and definitive camcorder, when it arrives, to see for my self how it works and what can be done with it in comparison to the miles of film I took for years on my 8-mm Cine-Kodak 8, the most beautifully simple movie camera ever made. Yes, I am now pretty sure that the ultimate consumer machine will be an 8-mm device too. That seems abundantly to be the camcorder future, the ultimate in miniaturization as occurs again and again for products in the 20th century.
The Beta and VHS camcorders are highly useful today for those who own extensive equipment and videocassettes in those formats, and their reign will continue for a lot longer, with ever more ingenuity. But the smaller, more compact 8-mm videotape has what it takes and will have more. Marvelous to say, its manufacturers seem to have gotten themselves reasonably together ahead of time, so that a degree of interchangeability just might persist into a successful future. (These people do share a common cause in challenging the established VHS and Beta systems. That helps a lot.)
It's interesting that the main parameters of the consumer camcorder were essentially set back in the antediluvian or Precambrian times, maybe five or six years ago, when the first sensational heavyweight models came out. I tried one, disastrously. That thing was no camcorder, just a camera, but it weighed over 5 pounds. And it trailed cables. But it had all the many automatic features that are standard on to day's camcorders-free-carrying units that weigh just over 3 pounds. Auto focus, auto color balance, auto expo sure, power zoom, and all the rest largely imitated the more perfected de vices on still cameras. The trouble was, six years ago, that not one of the auto functions worked at a level of competence higher than imbecilic. For in stance, the focus, when it stopped oscillating back and forth from front to rear, settled down to "infinity" at 10 feet. I've described this before and will not go on. Well, you have to start somewhere, and praise must go to those who did the agonizing initial development of the camcorder!
The newest models have exactly these same facilities but, more and more, they tend to work, the way that still cameras work. Pardon me if I suggest that there is still a way to go. But progress and miniaturization are astonishing--in all aspects except audio.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much interest in home-camera audio beyond the mere fundamentals. A mike is built into the camera, the worst possible spot for a decent sound pick up even for plain voice signals. There is mono, to feed into stereo sound equipment. Just maybe there is a facility for external mike(s), which-if you have any sense-you will use whenever you possibly can. True, mono is sufficient for most picture audio (not counting added music backgrounds). But if we tout stereo for little TV sets, why not for video cameras? The reasons are, I suppose, quite practical. Two-channel pickup from a camcorder isn't simple, even with the only practical setup, a tight cross-mike or coincident double microphone. Is the cost worth it? It makes things just that much more difficult, too, in the shielding, so close to the camera's various electronic systems.
I would say yes, it is worth it. The coincident mike pickup can be used pretty much like mono for voice, and if the mike is removable (the double mike), you can take advantage of any stereo possibilities, such as real music, recorded and video-graphed live. That makes your sound potential a lot more flexible and opens up new possibilities in the way of matching good pictures with really useful and well-placed ac companying sound, on the spot. (Added sound still can be used after the fact, when that is what you want.) Let's hope that someone will have the enterprise to offer a worthwhile stereo option on a forthcoming camcorder: A compact coincident mike, two channels, on the camera but removable if you choose. Two stereo connectors to match any stereo audio equipment that will follow. And maybe a mono switch, in parallel (but not, please, automatic!) for optional use when a mono pickup of voices is desirable. You would then have your choice for a wide range of audio effects.
Where would all this enterprise be forthcoming? Where else but in Japan. Though, just perhaps, one of our own few operators in home video might get there first. It would be nice, you know, for the good old U.S.A., for once, to show the primary forward look.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, July 1987)
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