Can't film on the bounce!

[Marc Peters]

As you may know, I've been training for the London Marathon with my girlfriend for the last 3 months. Although I'd originally planned to make a video diary of the training and a little video of the day, work pressures and other less interesting things have prevented me from spending the time on documenting our training. So at the half marathon in Hastings today, I thought I'd take a little miniDV camera along with me and record parts of the race. This would then act as a little bit of extra footage for the Marathon video, plus a trial run of running with a cam.

Well, I'm pleased to say that running with a small Sony handycam was fine. I'm running slowly anyway as I'm helping Hollie to pace herself to a good time. The problem was all the bouncing! Now I'm pretty adept at holding a small cam still, but unfortunatly it appears the tape mechanism itsn't! I could hear the thing rattling around, and my fears were proved correct when I played back the garbled footage. Such as shame, but glad I found out now and not after the marathon!

Thing is, I've filmed paintballing with an XM2 and all was fine. So it must be the less than robust taping mechanism on this cheap Sony. It could be the tape itself, but it was only the second use and the static footage shot was find. Anything where the camera is shaken results in half the footage from the previous shoot being played as stripes (both the audio and video).

So, it looks like I'll be buying one of those cheapo solid state cams for the marathon - but I'll try it out first!!!

[Marc Peters]

Well after thinking about this and coming back to the video, I think I may have jumped to the wrong conclusion. Unfortunately it appears that for some unknown reason the original video had been recorded as LP. So when I attempted to record over this as SP with another camcorder, the timecode got all messed up. So I'm not giving up on the miniDV option just yet...