Richard BF

Today is the first day of my second year of videoblogging. 156 videos in my first 12 months, that’s a video every two and a bit days.

To celebrate, I’ve decided to start shooting in widescreen. I’ve been gradually increasing the resolution and quality of my videos for a while now, and this just seemed like the next logical step. It wasn’t until I shot in widescreen that I realised why people probably aren’t using it more.

For starters, autofocus. What’s the point in being offset within the frame, if you’re out of focus? The solution is to either not to use distant backgrounds, or to set the manual focus before shooting, which means you can’t then pan out to an autofocused background. Thus more edits. Maybe if the camera had an easier way to shift the camera’s focus point with a simple finger or thumb press?

The second problem is that with my camera at least, while widescreen is encoded anamorphically, the CCD records in letterbox, effectively zooming in each shot. The result is that you need to hold the camera slightly further out than a regular 4:3 shoot, which for me was pretty much at arms length, causing my arm to tire more quickly.