
However, those types of cameras were not instant playback. I remember the days when I would shoot on 8mm film, 3 minutes at a time, that was the max mount of time on a roll of 8mm film, and then have to wait 3 weeks to get my masterpiece back, only to find some over exposure or blurriness.
Enter the magnetic tape video recorder, or for most people, the VHS camcorder. My first VHS camcorder was the Panasonic Palmcorder PV53 that used VHSC (VHS compact) this was a smaller, lighter video camera. VHS Camcorders had been around for a good number of years before this thing came on the scene. Early camcorders were expensive and bulky but this was a more compact unit and maybe that was the tipping point for my parents to pull the trigger and get one. Even though prices were coming down from the $1500 price tags, this still probably set my folks back $700 and this is late 80's money.

Enter the Cannon Optura 20, which was my first foray into digital video. MiniDV tapes was the format, a more accurate and robust media. It also recorded in then TV quality along with lots of manual adjustment features and stereo sound. The downside, at the time, is I didn't own a computer. I shot video with visions of being able to do non liner editing sometime in the future, just not at the time I had the camera. So I shot gigabytes worth of video that I am still combing through. I would own this camera 5 years before getting a computer with enough horsepower (read: good video card for rendering) and a firewire/IEEE 1394 (this is even before USB 2.0) port to do the transfer. Below is a good example of the types of video I shot with this camera.