It weighs 2 1/2 pounds, looks like a toy and is going to change how you do your work, whether you want it to or not. It's a small-format camera. Manufacturers such as Sony and Panasonic are selling cameras that look like palmcorders but use digital tape that is smaller than an audio cassette and better quality than the current broadcast-standard beta tape. Reporters are now using these cameras to go--literally--to the ends of the earth to get strong, visual stories. Michael Rosenblum, my boss and the president of Video News International, a company that trains reporters to use these DVC cameras, has a favorite analogy to describe what's about to happen to television reporting: "I liken it to the monks and Gutenberg. If you were a serf in the middle ages who was tired of cows and manure and wanted a career change, you'd go to the monks and say you wanted to be a writer. So they'd say, This is how you write and show you a huge book chained to a desk and give you gold and black paint. They'd say it was necessary to be complicated and expensive," he says. "Along comes Gutenberg and his printing press and now any idiot can make a book. These little cameras are Gutenberg's presses."
Rosenblum compares the monks to network television types, who hire expensive crews (cameraperson, sound engineer, associate producer, producer/director and "talent") to make a television story. The existing system has many flaws:
* A crew is expensive. The betacam sp package costs more than $30,000, and just to hire camera and sound person for an 8-9 hour day costs $1500. An entire small-format package (digital camera, tripod, several microphones, playback unit) costs about $5000.
* A crew needs lights, which can take hours to set up. The new cameras shoot indoors without light. We've even shot successfully at night, using only the light from a flashlight.
* A crew is time-consuming. The equipment, which needs as much as 15 cases to be transported, can take hours or days to get through customs. Producers are trained to look for delivery entrances and ramps, and get to know security guards quite well. Producers must book their crews weeks in advance, to insure getting everyone they need.
* A crew is cumbersome and intrusive. Think about four, five or six people, with equipment, crowding into a lab or a hospital room. Now picture trying to interview that person comfortably, and asking intimate questions. It's not possible.
Because the standard way to make television is so expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome, TV producers have had to get used to doing more with less. If it's a nightly news piece or feature, they tend to visit only one location, interview only one expert and often rely on file footage to flesh out the piece. Medical stories contain a lot of footage of a patient eating breakfast and walking down the street, while their disease is discussed by the reporter.
Documentary producers jump different hurdles. They spend weeks, sometimes months, researching their programs and then must exquisitely plan their 15-20 shooting days, because that's all they can afford. They frequently ask researchers to re-create their experiments. They must write a "treatment" in advance of shooting, so often their questions are pro-forma. "Can you say it this way?" is not an infrequent request of the interviewee.
The standard cost of an hour of television news or documentary is $350,000. Documentaries (a la "NOVA") take about one year to produce. (A recent documentary produced with small-format cameras took seven weeks to make and cost $130,000).
Now enter the reporter equipped with a DVC camera. She has had three weeks of training on how to get the basic shots to cover a scene. Often, this is the only television knowledge she has. She continues to work the same way she has as a print reporter. Of course, sometimes it's a little awkward, trying to make sure the shot is good, the audio is good and that the interview is going well, but people have been surprisingly adaptable.
Here's a recent example. Successful free-lancer (and former San Francisco Examiner science reporter) Jane Stevens heard about VNI about a year ago. One day, she calls me up and says "I'm going to Antarctic to do a story for National Geographic. Can I do a story for you guys, as well?"
Now, Jane had a little TV experience, as a studio reporter ("talent") for WGBH news in Boston. But she had extremely limited field experience. We called up Sony and asked "What is the lowest temperature under which this camera will not work?" They told us "about 30 degrees Fahrenheit." This was not good news, as we knew that she would be working at 20 degrees below zero. We also worried about the amount of light available. Jane assured us that for, at least several hours a day, there was "dusk-like" light, which we thought would be sufficient. But, at the time, we had a few extra cameras, and they are cheap enough, so we decided to take a chance. After all, reporters don't volunteer too often to spend two months in the Antarctic winter.
We quickly trained Jane, who was leaving for New Zealand the following week. She practiced at home, she practiced on the plane, she practiced in New Zealand before boarding the Nathaniel B. Palmer, an NSF ship that is the only American ice-breaker to study the winter sea-ice in Antarctic. Jane had with her a Hi-8 camera (the generation previous to the new digital cameras), several mikes, 40 one-hour tapes, an underwater housing ($1500, but what the hell, if you're doing a story on the ice you want to get underneath it), a battery charger, a small playback unit, a tripod, five batteries and a whole lot of warm clothing.
With layers of wrapping, the camera worked for as much as 15 minutes at a time outdoors. And she shot everything--the researchers working, snowball fights, the National Geographic photographer face-to-face with penguins, even herself getting dressed.
On the last day, she tried out the underwater housing. She had been afraid that the seals wouldn't hold in the frigid water and had been reluctant to use it until she got everything she needed from the cruise. It worked, and we had wonderfully clear images of the bottom of the ice, and how the ice-coring work was done.
As a matter of fact, everything worked. With the help of a producer and videotape editor, Jane's work was turned into a 15-minute story, which is airing on National Geographic Explorer, on TBS. It is a nice complement to her print story.
I cannot compare the costs of what Jane did, with her tiny camera, with a "regular" television production. Regular television, no matter how high the time and money budget, could not have sent a crew away for two months. Especially not knowing exactly what would result.
It was a crap shoot, and it paid off. It paid off in footage that VNI can use forever--not only for the National Geographic story, but for other programs we produce and sell around the world. We could also use it as library material, for CD-ROMs, for museum exhibits, for Internet use, for display at talks.
And that's where the future comes in. With increasing amounts of information available on-line, with 500 cable channels on the horizon, stories in the future will require video, even if they're text-based. And with so many channels splintering the audience size into fractions of what channels enjoy today, television companies will have even less money to spend gathering material. It's possible that, in the future, the small camera will become as essential as a computer is today .... an investment that reporters may have to make to increase the marketability of their work.
Nowhere is this more true than science reporting. One of the most frustrating things for science reporters--print or broadcast--is the inability to document the process of science--those small moments of frustration or discovery. Only a small format camera gives reporter the flexibility and access to be a "fly on the wall" in a lab or on an expedition. Researchers often forget that reporters are recording. It is like using a camera as a notebook, except the camera records faster than any one reporter can take notes.
Another example: Last summer, VNI was given a challenge by The Learning Channel: produce a documentary on viruses, focusing on the Ebola outbreak in Zaire and put it together before the outbreak (and public attention) diminished. We sent one videojournalist (vj), Alan Tomlinson, to Zaire. At first, like all reporters in Kikwit, he was refused access to the patients ward. No problem. He waited. He got to know the doctors and nurses. He went into the field with the epidemiologists and with the biologists. And after several weeks, when everyone got to know Alan and when they realized that he understood the story and would do a classy job, they let him into the ward.
Alan spent almost three weeks in Zaire ... more time than most crews have to shoot an entire documentary. Meanwhile, a reporter in Australia was shooting in a lab of a biologist identifying the new equine virus that killed a horse trainer. Another spent 10 days in the jungles near Manaus, Brazil, tracking a still-unidentified new virus. Another reporter visited researchers following the hantavirus in New Mexico, and a Miami-based vj traveled to Puerto Rico to spend time in a dengue fever lab and with mosquito-spraying crews.
All in all, seven videojournalists worked on the program, giving it a scope and depth that we couldn't have achieved any other way. And each one videotaped conversations and moments of discovery that couldn't have been captured with a traditional crew nor with a writer's description. The audience could be a witness to science as it is practiced.
That's the idea behind our newest project. VNI is 80% owned by The New York Times and we are now collaborating with the Science Times staff (editor: Nicholas Wade) to produce a television program with the range and depth of The New York Times.
Our first program, a thematic program about forensic science, is scheduled to air on The Learning Channel later this year. Our science videojournalists have made their calls, hopped on planes, are already shooting and on their way into the future.
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Peggy Girshman earlier had been deputy science editor at National Public Radio. She presented a workshop on this topic as an NASW session at the 1996 AAAS meeting.