Video technology has experience a quiet revolution in recent years, as the expectations of DVD based camcorders have slowly decrease and the onset of flash memory based models has grown exponentially.

Meanwhile, the cameras themselves have got smaller, cooler and better suited to the demands of on the fly shooting and uploading. It’s no wonder that shoot video is becoming popular again. While changing technology is introducing more and more people to videomaking, it’s also allowing videomakers to advance their skills, something that is occasionally forgotten amidst the clamour of home made videos.

Features and functions formerly only seen on professional and prosumer camcorders are now found on camcorders that cost only a few bucks of our money and the average camcorders now does more for you and lets you do more with it than have been imagined just a few years ago.

Zebra Patterning
Find the right exposure with speed and certainty.
Zebra Patterning is one of those quietly useful features that professional camera operators can’t do without, but which is almost entirely neglected by amateurs in favour of flashier, less useful gimmicks. Zebra patterning allows you to set a threshold for the brightness within an image, and any areas of the shot that stray over that threshold will be marked on the viewfinder with a rolling pattern of black and white bars that won’t be recorded to your movie.
Zebra patterning adds a degree of speed and certainty to finding the correct exposure on your camera. You usually get a choice of several thresholds, but the most useful two are 70% and 100%, with the latter intended to make sure your entire scene is within acceptable levels, while the former is cautiously pitched to avoid shiny, overexposed faces.
Anything hitting the 100% mark will be so overexposed as to burn out completely, losing all detail. Pick a threshold that suits your needs, and the zebra pattern will appear to warn you when you need to shut the aperture down a touch.

Face ID
Camcorders can tell what you’re looking at and automatically adjust the focus… spooky!

It goes by several different names, such as face chaser, face recognition and face detection. Whatever you call it, face ID on a camcorder mino hd is a handy time saver for you.
With the ability to recognise the basic ‘architecture’ of a face – two eyes, a nose, a mouth and an outline – camcorders can now tell when they’re looking at people. Working on the assumption that people are the most important part of the shot, they can adjust their focus and exposure values to prioritise the part of the shot in which it has detected a face. The technology first appeared on stills compact cameras and it took its time to arrive on video due to greater demands of making the relevant recognition and adjustment calculations for moving pictures.
Yet again, the progression of camcorders from being lenses attached to a tapedeck, towards being lenses attached to a computer, has paid dividends. Finally, camcorders incorporate the processing power required to recognise several faces at a time and now even faces in profile, making sure your talking heads are always sharp and correctly exposed.