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Given the choice between a nice, new, smaller camera and my 12 year old tape driven DVCPro, I’ll keep the old camera. It’s the beast I trust.
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I’ll also wager that the “beast” is far more durable and able to shrug off abuse than the small cameras. I’ve seen Betacams fall off pickup truck tailgates to pavement and only suffer another scrape and need nothing more than a new lens hood and to reset the back focus.
Matching video quality is another issue - just because something says it’s HD doesn’t mean it’s good. Some friends did a music video a while back with one “real” broadcast cam and a prosumer jobbie and the little camera looks like a parking lot security camera. The resolution’s there, but the contrast and color quality were flat.
Yes, I saw the thread looked dead so I put them back on private. I have ex wife idiocy issues so I like to keep a low web profile.
My proudest work is probably any time my quick thinking and experience brings me to the right place at the right time when it comes to breaking news. The blizzards of 2010 were good, various breaking news events like a Virginia tornado touchdown I was at minutes after it happened and hours before the competition. Stuff like that.
Some of those semi-pro cams do have some decent specs–in certain areas. But they lack a lot of features that a professional TV photographer needs to do the job correctly. Nonetheless, with TV stations making budget cuts left and right, these cameras are popping up more and more in TV news operations. Mostly, they aren’t being used by experienced photographers, but by reporters who don’t know that much about videography, so don’t really care. Most professional shooters won’t touch the things if they can avoid it.
The biggest difference between a good, broadcast-quality ENG system and a semi-pro camcorder, in my opinion, is the lens more then the camera/recorder body. However, to use the good lenses, you need to use certain camera bodies. A broadcast-quality Funjinon, Angenieux, Canon, etc. lens will only mount on “pro” cameras (as well as a few “prosumer” cameras). AFAIK, most prosumer and consumer video cameras don’t have removable, manual lenses.
These lenses cost somewhere around $15,000 - $25,000 and up, and there are good reasons why a news organization would pay that much for a lens (the camera and recorder are an additional $10,000 to $80,000 or more).
First, they have “good glass” meaning the lens elements are of a very high quality that produce sharp images with very little distortion or chromatic aberration, and they’re “fast” which means you don’t need as much light, hence, you don’t need to pump up your camera gain as often or as much (for very low-light shooting). Of course your camera has something to say about the image quality too.
Second, these are zoom lenses that give you good stuff from quite wide-angle, to 13x or so telephoto–optical, not digital, of course. (Plus they have high quality 2x expanders, too).
Third, you can use them for macro shots that you can focus manually. Associated with this is the adjustable back-focus which is critical because you’re zooming in and out all the time, and the camera can get jostled around a lot.
And, you can precisely focus the thing with just a quick flick of the wrist–the focus ring is manual and mechanical. It doesn’t just spin around and around and around like a servo-focus ring–sometimes giving you a precise focus, sometimes not (and never in a timely fashion). This is very important in photojournalism where you have to react and focus in split-seconds.
Naturally, the camera itself (it’s separate from the lens–like an SLR) is important too, but these days you can pretty much get away with a less expensive one ($10,000 to $15,000) as long as the lens is good.
A lot of the expense of the camera is about the sensor size, and how many sensors it has (3 sensors–one for each color, versus only 1 sensor for everything). A good TV news camera will have 2/3 inch sensors, as opposed to consumer/prosumer cameras with 1/2 inch or less.
It will also generate it’s own color bars (I won’t get into why that is a good thing), generate accurate time code, have BNC video and XLR audio jacks, and offer full manual control of everything–which is critical, as auto this, and auto that just doesn’t get it done in professional work.
To sum it all up, there are significant differences between those “big unwieldy” cameras you see the pros use, and the little 2-pound cameras holiday-makers and weekend wedding shooters tote around. At first glance, those smaller, cheaper cameras might seem good enough for pros to use, but they’re really not, generally speaking. IMO, they would make the job pretty much impossible.
Have you ever forgotten to grab your camera on the way out of the station to a story? Yes, I did that when I was a photog. And the story was a good 45 minutes away. Of course, I didn’t notice until I got there. Very embarrassing. Only happened once.
Edited to add: Any other funny or embarrassing stories you’re willing to share with us?
I am in Washington DC so I have one of the better jobs in my industry in America. That said, tv stations are divided into ‘markets’, a ranking of how large a viewing audience is for those stations serving it. DC is about market #8 last I checked. NY is #1, LA #2, etc.
Also I get a bit of an advantage working in our nation’s capitol, and I am in a union shop, for what little that is worth these days. In the past 3 years I have taken 17% in pay cuts to keep my job. I am very happy to still have a job.
The answer is I earn in the upper 5 figure range on average yearly, which is pretty darn good for photogs. Most photogs in the first 30 markets earn on average $50k, In the next 70 markets the average is $35k, and below that its likely around $22k. These are pure guesses based on my experience, and vary across the board.
It’s not a business you get rich in.
As for hours I can work 40 - 80 hours in a week, averaging 45 hrs. 95% of overtime is unscheduled, ie: breaking news means I am staying late or being called in. One must be flexible and love your job if you want to make the money.
Right now laid up on medical I am not makimng any O.T. It sucks.
None are jumping out at me this moment but if I think of any I will get back to you.
Perhaps the first 2 years of my current job may count. I was moderately familiar with DC when I took this gig, so in order to get anywhere I always had a map in my lap. Talk about distracted driving!
I ended up having 4 accidents in 2 years and came very close to losing my job. I ended up buying a GPS to save my job, and I haven’t had a close call since. Truly, I take distractions much more seriously now.
Once I was tasked to shoot a story at my first job at a microbrewery in Cambridge, MD. I was using a tube camera tethered to a separate 3/4" Umatic deck. I carefully shot the entire story from beginning to end, following the assembly line. Took me an hour.
At the end I discovered the recorder had malfunctioned and though my record light had been turning on & off, tape never rolled. I fixed the deck and re-shot the story in under 10 minutes, since I already knew what all the shots were.
That reminds me of another one I had. We were doing a ride-along with a police officer, and we put a wireless mic on him. I hooked up the mic, had him test it, set the levels, etc. Everything looked great. (I’m sure you can see where this is going already.) I couldn’t shoot with the camera on my shoulder to get the angle I wanted, so I wasn’t able to hear the audio through the speaker on the camera. If I’d have been smart, I’d have had an earphone with me to monitor the audio, but I didn’t. To this day I’m not sure what happened, but the wireless just didn’t work in the car. It wasn’t staticy or anything – there was just silence on that channel. Maybe a loose connection or something? I don’t know. But outside of the car it worked. So whenever we got out of the car (and I had the speaker by my ear), things seemed fine.
Only when I got to the station to edit, did I find out that I had no wireless audio for all the stuff in the car (which was most of the important material). I had audio from the on-camera mic, but I’m sure you can imagine how great that was. I had to use it. There was no other option. But that package was not my best piece of work.
I think that happened to me once. Getting back to the newsroom and finding you don’t have anything on your primary audio channel really sucks. I ALWAYS had an earpiece in my ear when doing an interview (or a live shot).
…Well… I guess I didn’t have it in that one, horrible, time (I was runnin’ and gunnin’ fer sure)! But you can bet I always monitored my interview sound with an earpiece AFTER that!
I never had the speaker on my camera turned up at all–I only used an earpiece to monitor. To me, the speaker was useless, as I was often in a fairly loud setting when gathering news. Plus, I don’t think you can hear some of the less apparent (but VERY apparent once it airs!) wireless mic interference unless you are wearing an earpiece.
: How much money do you make and how many hours do you work a week?