"Come on!" I said.
This was over twenty years ago.
I went with my friends to Toys R Us.
"There it is!" I said.
It was a Fisher Price PXL2000---the toy camcorder that really worked! Produced a slightly fuzzy black and white picture recorded on an ordinary audio cassette tape.
It cost about $100 at a time when real camcorders could cost a thousand bucks.
My friends scoffed. I didn't buy it. I shouldn't have listened to them. Now the PXL 2000 is coveted by artists and bohemians.
I don't know why it matters. There's a free program for Mac computers to modify video to make it look like a PXL 2000 picture. Even if you don't have that, there's a way to monkey with the image to do the same thing.
I'm not sure what all of this means, but here's how to do it:
http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/fake-pxl2000-effect/1. Scale your footage to fit a 540 x 405 composition at 15 frames per second. (This is exactly 75% of a full 720 x 540 NTSC frame.)
2. Reduce the saturation to 0.
3. Apply a Gaussian blur with a radius of 1.5 pixels.
4. Sharpen the image 30%.
5. Clamp the black point to about 5% and the white point to about 95%.
6. Compress the dynamic range of the entire image by about 1.2 to 1.
7. Posterize to 90 steps.
8. Add a lag effect; this should add a small proportion of the three previous frames to each frame, giving slight trails and motion artifacting.
9. If desired, add a scanline or “TV” effect.
10. Clamp the white and black points again.
11. Apply a second 1.5-pixel Gaussian blur.
12. Expand your composition to 720 x 540, leaving a large black border around the frame.
13. If necessary, scale your finished composition to meet your output requirements (720 x 480 for an NTSC DVD, for example).
But why do artists go for the PXL 2000 picture but dismiss other lovely analog video? Look at VHS or S-VHS video, or Hi8!
I was filming some stuff one day with a huge S-VHS camcorder. A fellow began talking to me. I told him a couple of times that I wasn't from "the media", but he kept talking, giving me a message to pass on to governor.
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