2000-01
Mini DV Home Video
Mini DV was the home camcorder of the early 2000s: digital, interlaced and standard definition. The render is clean and fairly sharp, with light compression, a sharpening edge and a little shake.
Why the 2000s look like this
By 2000 the home camcorder was digital. A Mini DV tape was the size of a matchbox, and the camera wrote numbers onto it instead of a wavering analogue signal. The color smear and tracking wobble of the 1990s were gone. What you saw instead was a clean, slightly hard picture: standard definition, still interlaced, with the camera's own sharpening drawing a thin bright edge around everything.
The reason is compression. Even a small DV frame was too much data to store raw, so the camera cut each picture into small blocks and threw away the detail it judged you wouldn't miss. Mini DV did this gently and you rarely notice it. Later in the decade, camcorders that wrote to small DVD discs used a heavier kind of compression that looked across several frames at once. On fast motion or dark scenes its blocks show through, especially in shadows and in the sky.
High definition reached home camcorders in the middle of the decade. Tape-based HD in 1080i, then cameras that wrote HD to memory cards and hard drives, gave a wide 16:9 picture with real detail, crisp edges and a slightly glassy, oversharpened finish. Interlacing stayed with many of them. When you freeze a frame of fast motion, you can still find the comb-tooth edges of two half-pictures that were taken a fraction of a second apart.
At the other end of the scale, video appeared in everything that had a sensor. Compact still cameras recorded short clips at small sizes and about 15 pictures a second, which gave a soft, slightly stuttering picture. Camera phones recorded even less: tiny, mushy, blocky clips with noise in every shadow. In the second half of the decade, cheap pocket camcorders with a USB plug and a fixed lens made shooting and uploading easy. Then, at the end of the decade, digital SLRs learned to shoot video. Their large sensors gave a shallow, cinematic focus, but they read the picture out line by line, so a quick pan made vertical lines lean like wet noodles.
Photography went digital in the same years. CCD compacts with a few megapixels, a zoom and a strong little flash made the snapshot of the decade: a bright face, a black background and a white sky. Bright edges against the light picked up purple fringes. Camera phones began in Japan in 2000 and spread over the next few years. Entry-level digital SLRs dropped under a thousand dollars in 2003. By 2009 retro filter apps were adding fake borders and vignettes to phone pictures, a sign that people already missed film.
What the camera rebuilds
Set the DECADE dial to 2000. The base recipe is Mini DV: clean standard-definition color, light block compression, in-camera sharpening, a little sensor noise and handheld shake. The TECHNOLOGY dial moves those values. DVD Camcorder MPEG-2 raises the compression and blocks. Tape HD 1080i and 1080i Memory Card Camcorder are crisper, and the memory-card camera sharpens harder. Early DSLR Video adds strong rolling-shutter skew. Interlaced Consumer Video shows the combing of two fields on anything that moves.
The low-end cameras sit at 15 pictures a second: Compact Digital Camera Video and Early Camera Phone Video. The file is still 24 fps; the app holds frames to give you that small stutter.
In STILL, the styles add the digital faults of the decade: block compression, sharpening halos, sensor noise, CCD blooming in bright highlights, purple fringing and hard flash fall-off. Extreme HDR Tone-Mapped draws the strong local contrast and halos of late-2000s tone mapping. Retro Filter App crops square and adds a white app frame with rounded corners.
With SOUND on PERIOD, the voice goes through a Mini DV chain: a wide band from about 40 Hz to 19 kHz, no wow or flutter, and a low bed of microphone preamp hiss with a little motor hum from the tape transport. It's clean digital audio from a cheap built-in microphone, which is exactly how it sounded.
Shooting tips
- School play, 2003. Mini DV Home Video at DEGREE 7, from the back of a dim hall. If you want more grit, switch to Indoor Mini DV Low Light.
- Skate clip. Pocket Camcorder at DEGREE 9, held low and moving. Its shake, noise and oversharpening suit fast, scrappy footage.
- The phone in your pocket, 2005. Early Camera Phone Video at DEGREE 10 for a clip that looks like it was sent to a friend over a slow network.
- Party flash. In STILL, Compact Flash Party with FLASH on in a dark room. For the date in the corner, use Digital Date Imprint, and set the year with SET CLOCK in MENU.
- Wide HD. Choose 16:9 with the FORMAT button and shoot Tape HD 1080i Camcorder for a holiday that looks newly expensive.
Go back to the analogue tapes of the 1990s, or ahead to the smartphones of the 2010s. For how the looks are built, see how it works.
