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Jay Sato, vice president of Sony’s personal video division from 1990 to 1998, oversaw the entire design and production of the VX1000.
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The VX1000, with its DV tapes and firewire input, solved practically all of these problems.Īlthough digital video was available to professional television and movie producers beginning in the late ’80s, amateur filmmakers had to wait until 1995 for Sony to release the VX1000, the first consumer-level digital video camera, and its accompanying miniDV tapes. “I sent all my tapes to Planet Earth and that video ended up getting cancelled, so there’s footage of Ed that never saw the light of day.” (Years passed before Stewart learned his tapes had been forgotten in shoe boxes under the bed of Chad Fernandez, who briefly rode for Planet Earth.) Stewart suffered this fate with a part he filmed of Ed Selego for Planet Earth skateboards. It also wasn’t unheard of for skaters’ entire video parts to get lost in the haphazard network of mailing out tapes. People were filming with so many different types of cameras, there was no standard.” “Before digital video cameras came out it was the Wild West. Often they edited directly from one VHS to another using their home VCRs. DV was such a huge step because you could make dubs via firewire,” a cable for connecting your camcorder directly to your computer, “and it was the same quality.” Before firewire, few filmers could even transfer footage to a computer. “If you made a duplicate you’d see the degradation in quality. “When you were filming on Hi8 you’d have to physically send the original tapes to whoever you were sending footage to because you couldn’t make dupes ,” Stewart said. “People were filming with so many different types of cameras, there was no standard.” If the Hi8 or VHS tape you were using didn’t glitch while you were filming, you were still at risk of having your footage lost or damaged on its way to whichever video editor you sent it to. “Before digital video cameras came out it was the Wild West,” Stewart told me. Making skate videos in the pre-VX era was a fiddly mess. Josh stewart filming jahmal williams / photo: pep kim The longer and more fun answer: Skateboarders made the VX1000 an institution. The VX’s top-mounted handle and weight (about four pounds) make the camcorder easy to hold and stabilize when you’re cruising around, and the thing is durable enough to sustain being dropped or smacked by an errant skateboard. The MK1, better known as the “death lens,” is still the biggest, roundest fisheye available. The short answer: The VX1000 and Century Optics MK1 fisheye lens just work well for skating. As camcorders progress faster and faster, the lifespan of any given model becomes increasingly shorter, making it harder for older camcorders, especially those as old as the VX1000, to compare to anything current.Īnd yet among skateboarders, the VX continues to be heralded as not merely a useable camcorder, but a preferred one. Bulky tapes that hold one hour of footage have been replaced with thumbnail-sized memory cards that hold five-and-a-half days of footage. Hefty camcorders with resolutions under 500,000 pixels have been made obsolete by cell phone cameras with resolutions of over 12 million pixels. So seeing Jeremy Wray three-sixty over that lens was like, ‘What the fuck is that? I have to figure that out.’”Ĭonsumer video technology has seen extensive innovations since the time Sony introduced the VX1000 in 1995. “The VX1000 and that original Century Optics fisheye, the combination of those two made it this super camera. It was shockingly powerful.” Josh Stewart is telling me about the day he fell in love with the Sony DCR-VX1000 camcorder. “ Jeremy Wray front three-sixty-ing the Santa Monica triple set was the first thing I saw with that lens and that camera.