Camcorders soon replaced Super 8 as the film recordists’ machine of choice, but are now themselves being usurped from popularity by pocket cameras and DSLRs with expanded video capability.
78 : Sony Handycam
1985
Camcorders soon replaced Super 8 as the film recordists’ machine of choice, but are now themselves being usurped from popularity by pocket cameras and DSLRs with expanded video capability.
On the windy morning of 1 October 1995, David Ferguson and Jo Wayte were walking on the cliff-top path near Land’s End, Cornwall, when they found an unfamiliar warbler flitting around on the ground. Unlike most birders at the time, David Ferguson carried a video camera along with his optics, and he managed to get a few seconds’ worth of shaky but identifiable footage of the bird – crucially, including some evidence of the almost site-specific local flora.
His suspicion that it was a Bay-breasted Warbler was borne out by the video, and forensic analysis of the footage tied the plants to the location, thereby confirming the first ever occurrence of the species on the European side of the Atlantic. Without the critical video evidence, such an extreme record would be far less likely to gain acceptance.
Although not widely adopted by birders at the time, camcorders had undergone a general surge in popularity a decade earlier, when Sony launched Video8. An alternative to the compact VHS-derived VHS-C format, Video8 helped revolutionise home movie production in the 1980s in much the same way as Super 8 had done in the 1960s (see pages 138–139). Preceded by Sony’s Betamovie – the first one-piece consumer camcorder – and Betamax and Betacam product lines, Video8 offered state-of-the-art compactness for amateur film-making, with camcorders for the first time small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. This enabled users to shoot movies easily on their own, recording events onto cheap and durable video cassettes. The format also had superior audio quality to most rival formats and longer recording capabilities than VHS-C.
One of the first Video8 camcorders to be successful commercially was the Handycam, introduced by Sony in 1985 and doing for video what the Walkman did for portable music players. Video formats continued to develop rapidly, however, and though Video8 persisted before giving way to the better-quality Hi8 format, it was the larger, longer and better-quality VHS cassettes that became the consumer product of choice after 1987, when full size VHS cameras were introduced to the market. Ultimately, analogue formats quickly waned following the introduction of digital video.
It was the advent of digital camcorders and then video functions on both compact and DSLR cameras that brought the biggest surge in video recordings of wild birds, from backyards to rarities worldwide. And no longer did shooting footage of birds mean a significant financial outlay on equipment: using accessories such as inexpensive iPhone adapters for telescopes, recording relatively good sequences became easily achievable with just a mobile phone and telescope.
While that is welcome progress, video footage is not necessarily always the last word in bird identification. Amid much fanfare in 2005, and largely on the basis of blurred video footage, Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the rediscovery in Arkansas, USA, of Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a highly charismatic species declared extinct in 1996. Unfortunately, the announcement proved premature, the film later being rather convincingly shown to involve a poorly filmed Pileated Woodpecker. By this time the ‘rediscovery’ had not only made headlines globally, but led to the reallocation of a small fortune in conservation dollars, as well as spark a healthy line in woodpecker souvenirs.