Big Cameras v. Small Cameras

Call the chiropractor!!

My very first job in TV news was at WCBS, the CBS local station in New York.

I was a researcher and my boss was a guy named Tom Petner.

During my first month at work I made some minor mistake and Petner hauled me into his office and started reaming me a new one...

he ended his rant by saying 'there are 200 people in here every day looking for your job'.

I grew up in a military family.  My old man was a Colonel in the US Army. I was used to being screamed it. It didn't phase me in the least. Petner, in fact, was an amateur.

I turned to Petner and said 'give it to them', and walked out of his office and WCBS.

Thus ended my first foray in to local TV news.

That was many years ago.

These days, Tom Petner produces a daily newsletter called The 24/7 Newsroom.

It's excellent reading.

This morning's newsletter included a piece from Cincinatti veteran TV news cameraman Randy Hansen entitled:

My Camera vs. Your Camera
Is my full-sized news camera as good as the little cameras given to reporters?
By Randy Hansen - The Photographer's Viewfinder

As an old school professional photographer, Hansen likes his big old camera.

OK, it may weigh a ton, but it has benefits.

Hansen doesn't hesitate to point them out.

Fair enough.

An IBM mainframe is a lot more robust than a crappy toy Apple laptop.

Which is more 'professional'?

hmmm

Which would you rather drag around with you all day?

While Hansen seems unaware that you can put the 'toy' cameras into manual focus (his biggest complaint is the autofocus apparently), he seems equally unware of the benefits of the smaller and/or DSLR cameras - or the fact that they are pretty impressive in terms of what the technology delivers.

The real trade offs here are both what I would call the schlep factor (dragging all that crap around all day, every day takes a toll), and the cost factor, which Hansen buries at the end. 

"And that brings us to the elephant in the room:  if these reporter cameras are not adequate for the job of gathering news video, why use them at all?  Well, my P2 is priced in the neighborhood of $25,000 - depending on the options (a 32G P2 card alone is around $500). A typical reporter camera, the Panasonic AG-HVX200A retails for less than $3200)

Well yes, exactly Randy.

But it's not the 'elephant in the room', it is in fact the driving factor here.

For the cost of your one camera a local news operation can buy 8 'reporter cameras'.

Now, multiply that by the number of cameras your station currently field - let's say 8?

That means that now, in place of putting 8 cameras on the streets of Cincinatti every day to cover the news, your station can now put, in theory, 64 cameras on the streets of Cincinatti.

Suppose you had two competing newspapers covering Cincinatti - one with 8 reporters working the beat and one with 64. Which one is going to deliver better value, better coverage, better news and better stories to their readers? 

Exactly.

So yes, you go out and do a story, but so does your reporter, your producer, your editor and anyone else who wants to be in the news business.

The newsroom should, in fact, be empty pretty much all day long.

(you can actually get rid of the newsroom entirely, but that's another story for another day).

When you limit the number of cameras you can field you limit the number of stories you can cover. In fact, when there are so few cameras in play you can't make any mistakes, so you are generally relegated to covering stories that come from the local paper or press releases - the 'sure things'.  You can't take a risk because you can't afford to come back and say 'gosh, that one just didn't pan out'.

So your 'news' becomes banal, predictable - in fact the same exact thing your competitors are covering.

Boring.

Journalism, (real journalism) requires the ability to take risks.  To sense that there 'might be a story here' and then go check it out.

This is why newspapers always break stories and TV follows. Because newspapers can take risks because it's just a reporter and a pad and pencil.

Well, the 'reporter camera' is an electronic pad and pencil - cheap, mobile, easy to use.

It's not crime.

Yes, your big camera is better...compared to a reporter camera.

But your big camera is crap compared to Panavision.

Show Steven Spielberg your work and he would say 'garbage'.

So go buy your station one massive Panavision camera and some great lights and shoot to your heart's content.

Each night your station will produce one hell of a piece, ....with the emphasis on one.