Camera Conversion
Besides the large Panasonic camera, Lisa also has a much smaller unit (an AG-HMR10) that she used in Dublin because it is much smaller and can be packed in her luggage. It consists of a recorder unit connected to a separate camera lens by a 3m long cable. (There is an optional 10m extension cable as well, which could be useful if you were flying the lens around on a boom or something like that.) Lisa has always wanted to make this into a usable handheld video camera. Today, she rolled out the conversion kit.
This side view shows how she built a metal bracket that holds the recording unit and the lens, providing both a handhold and an arm rest. She had to shorten the 3 m cable down to about 20 cm. That was very tricky work, as the cable has 20 internal wires and would be rather expensive to replace. As it stands, we now have 2.5 m of leftover cable and some spare connectors, should Lisa ever decide to tackle the very difficult task of wiring the 20-pin connectors into the cable. The cable appears to be custom to Panasonic, and we're not even sure it works on any other model of Panasonic camera but this one.
Here's what it looks like from the front.
And here's a top/rear view. In case you're wondering why Lisa cut up that expensive cable, consider the difficult of coiling 3 m of thick, heavy, 20-pin video cable up in any sort of manageable bundle for what it supposed to be lightweight handheld unit.
There's still some details on which Lisa is working, but overall she is very pleased with this rig, and will take it with her on our upcoming travel. While she prefers to use the big Panasonic for fixed recording like the Business Meeting, this unit will make doing handheld work easier, and less of a pain in the shoulder.
Lisa points out, before someone asks why we didn't just buy some new DSLR camera: This is a professional grade camera with a number of extra features that she wants that you are unlikely to find on most consumer cameras. It can be easily swapped to ground power if needed, and can record continuously for as long as there is memory on the camera. Contrast this with most consumer units, which tend to overheat after a while. A typical consumer-grade camera, for example, could not be used to record a 3-hour WSFS Business Meeting, because the camera would likely overheat. I have noticed that some of the videos I've watched on YouTube have had the people doing them complain that they've lost footage because their camera overheated. That's not likely to happen here. Besides, not only will this camera outperform most of the DSLR units we've looked at, but it cost less (even counting the $30 in hardware we got for her to build the bracket), and we already had it!
This side view shows how she built a metal bracket that holds the recording unit and the lens, providing both a handhold and an arm rest. She had to shorten the 3 m cable down to about 20 cm. That was very tricky work, as the cable has 20 internal wires and would be rather expensive to replace. As it stands, we now have 2.5 m of leftover cable and some spare connectors, should Lisa ever decide to tackle the very difficult task of wiring the 20-pin connectors into the cable. The cable appears to be custom to Panasonic, and we're not even sure it works on any other model of Panasonic camera but this one.
Here's what it looks like from the front.
And here's a top/rear view. In case you're wondering why Lisa cut up that expensive cable, consider the difficult of coiling 3 m of thick, heavy, 20-pin video cable up in any sort of manageable bundle for what it supposed to be lightweight handheld unit.
There's still some details on which Lisa is working, but overall she is very pleased with this rig, and will take it with her on our upcoming travel. While she prefers to use the big Panasonic for fixed recording like the Business Meeting, this unit will make doing handheld work easier, and less of a pain in the shoulder.
Lisa points out, before someone asks why we didn't just buy some new DSLR camera: This is a professional grade camera with a number of extra features that she wants that you are unlikely to find on most consumer cameras. It can be easily swapped to ground power if needed, and can record continuously for as long as there is memory on the camera. Contrast this with most consumer units, which tend to overheat after a while. A typical consumer-grade camera, for example, could not be used to record a 3-hour WSFS Business Meeting, because the camera would likely overheat. I have noticed that some of the videos I've watched on YouTube have had the people doing them complain that they've lost footage because their camera overheated. That's not likely to happen here. Besides, not only will this camera outperform most of the DSLR units we've looked at, but it cost less (even counting the $30 in hardware we got for her to build the bracket), and we already had it!