FMP - DVCAM Experimentation

To experiment for my FMP, I did a few test shoots using an old Sony PD170, in order to find out how easy it is to use and what results it gives. This is for usage of old style footage in my magazine advert, to provide a retro and stylised vibe to it. Here is an example of what I'm aiming to achieve by using a camera like this:

Shooting with the camera was fairly easy apart from it's weight, although this did help the shots be more stable. Something which was good about the camera was it's zoom and autofocus as it was very fast. Transferring the footage from tape to digital took a long time which was a negative of using the camera, however the footage looked unique and stylistic. Lastly the sound was high quality and sounded good, although if this wasn't the case it wouldn't be much of an issue.

Here is the footage I got when using the PD170:



After this I put some footage from the same shoot which I took on a DSLR with regular settings into After Effects and edited it to see if I could achieve an old, 90's style video effect. I adjusted the colour channels and added grain and some blur, and this is the result I got:


Overall I think that it will be easier to emulate a retro camera using effects for my FMP as opposed to using a real one. This is because it is expensive and time consuming to use tape as it all has to be transferred in real time, whereas I can specifically adjust the amount of distortion and noise etc when superimposing the effects myself. It's also a much quicker process doing it digitally myself.