Seeing Is Believing

Some tips on the use of video camcorders in business

It's a rare technology that moves from the home into business. Telephones and computers, for example, became household regulars only after they were well established in business. Video cameras and recorders, in contrast, have been popular in homes for a decade and only recently have begun moving into the workplace.

Most businesses still reserve videotapes for special occasions, such as trade shows. Demonstrating a piece of machinery can be done much more effectively with pictures and sound than in print. Training new employees might also best be done with the help of video.

But consider, too, your weekly management presentation. Practicing in front of a mirror might show you a few ways to improve your form, but watching a videotape of a real meeting is the best way to see yourself as others see you. Applied analytically, this technique can lead to dramatic improvements in the style, and even the content, of your presentations.

Or what about using video to keep an audiovisual notebook? You can tape a company meeting or a conference for those who couldn't make it, put together a realistic tour of potential new office or store locations, and even record interviews with job applicants to let more people in your company size up potential hires.

Finally, consider this idea: instead of putting your polished 10-minute product profile on a cassette with only 10 minutes of tape (as most professional duplicating services do), put it at the beginning of a standard two-hour tape, and give this tape to your prospective clients. They can watch the tape at home and then rewind and reuse it for whatever they want. This strategy can ensure you private time with a prospect, time that may be hard to come by in a busy office.

You have two choices for making business videotapes: hire a professional video production company, or do it yourself. For critical tapes -- a key sales presentation or public introduction -- a professionally produced tape is usually the best choice. Expect to spend about $8,000 to $13,000 for a polished 10-minute video and far more if you want something really fancy.

For less-than-special occasions, however, doing it yourself is becoming more and more practical. To tape a presentation for internal review, for example, you need only a video camera, recorder, and a tripod -- just aim and shoot. With the proliferation of equipment for the home video market, you have plenty to choose from for your average business needs. And you won't need to hire a professional photographer: anyone who has mastered a 35-millimeter single-lens reflex camera will have little trouble picking up the basics of making a business video.

So, to get video up and running in your company, you'll need to budget for the video maker's time, and make a onetime investment in equipment. A 10-minute video takes from a few hours to a day or so to make. The total outlay for basic equipment bought through a discount house is about $3,000 for a camcorder (a compact combination video camera and recorder), a tabletop videocassette recorder (VCR), a television, and an editing controller.

Equipment choices
What kind of equipment should you look for? The key difference among types of video equipment is format. Probably the most familiar format is full-size VHS, which has dominated the home VCR market since Sony's Beta began fading some five years ago. Today the main choice is between VHS and 8 millimeter.

VHS (Video Home System) is actually a family of formats that use half-inch-wide tape. Full-size VHS tapes hold two hours of video at the highest and best-quality speed, six hours at the slowest speed. (An eight-hour tape is available but not recommended for ordinary use.) Camcorders that take full-size VHS tapes are big and heavy; they are fine for use around the office but are cumbersome if you have to travel with them. The main advantage of full-size VHS camcorders is playback ease; you can pop a tape directly from the camcorder into any VHS deck.

VHS also comes in a compact format called VHS-C; the tape cassettes and camcorders are about one-third as big as full-size VHS equipment, so they are much easier to take on the road. With a slightly awkward adapter, VHS-C cassettes can also be played on any VHS deck. VHS-C cassettes run for only 20 minutes at the standard recording speed, however, so they are not suited to long taping sessions. At the slowest speed, a VHS-C cassette will run for one hour, but you must be willing to accept a poor picture.

Better video-recording techniques have modified ordinary VHS to produce two other formats that boast a significantly sharper picture: full-size Super VHS and compact Super VHS-C. Super VHS decks and camcorders can record and play back ordinary VHS tapes, but an ordinary VHS recorder cannot play back a Super VHS tape. Both ordinary and Super VHS images can be viewed on any television, however. The improvement of Super VHS over ordinary VHS is striking enough so that if you decide on the VHS format, you should get Super VHS for recording tapes.

Even smaller than VHS-C or Super VHS-C, and technologically more advanced, is the 8-millimeter format (not to be confused with 8-millimeter movies). About the size of an audiocassette, an 8-millimeter tape can hold as much as two hours at normal recording speed and four hours at slow speed. The 8-millimeter VCRs and camcorders are better designed than their VHS counterparts, and the format has other advantages as well.

Because the format is small, 8-millimeter camcorders can incorporate a full set of recording and playback features that are lacking in VHS and VHS-C camcorders. Smaller size means lower power requirements: an 8-millimeter camcorder can use smaller batteries than a VHS model. And 8-millimeter has a special advantage: because compatible equipment is rare in homes, your employees are less likely to borrow the camera for their kids' birthday parties. The one area where the 8-millimeter format lags behind VHS is picture sharpness, but an updated format, 8-millimeter Hi-Band, which should have about the same sharpness as Super-VHS, will appear by 1989.