I’m delighted with my Sony DCR-HC22E camcorder. But one thing that has been disappointing is its performance in low-light. It isn’t a patch on my old Canon Hi8, which can pretty much shoot anything the eye can make out and also corrects the colour well — even in street lighting at night.

For indoor shooting, I had equipped myself with several 60 watt spotlights from IKEA, which produced good results with the Canon — even for bluescreen special effects. But these aren’t enough for the Sony. The images are noisy.

So, what’s the solution for my ‘no budget’ film making?

I have a couple of Photax photographic stands and lamp holders that have provided faithful service for 25 years now. They take ordinary screwfitting domestic bulbs or photoflood bulbs (which come in 275 watt or 500 watt versions).

Trouble is, photofloods are expensive (£7 for a 500 watt bulb) and they have a short life.

An alternative is to use 200 watt domestic bulbs. Purists will point out that these change colour with age but, in practice, it isn’t a problem.

What IS a problem is that I can’t find any 200 watt bulbs in central Manchester (the third largest city in England). So I’ll probably have to order the bulbs online.

An alternative is work lighting. Screwfix do two 500W tungsten halogen lamps, on a 1.8m telescopic tripod stand, with a 4.5m cable — for just £16.99 and replacement bulbs cost just 76p. You can imagine how much a ’special video lighting’ version of this set-up would cost from a photo shop!

The lights will work great if bounced from a white wall or ceiling, or shone through some kind of diffuser. So I may order this too.

The Times reports that the most popular video blogs may have to comply with new European television regulations, if proposals are adopted by Europe’s member states.

However British ministers and regulators believe that a light touch and selfregulation is the way to go. They plan to lobby their counterparts elsewhere in Europe to force some amendments.

‘Democracy Player is a new kind of browser for watching videos– grab webpages with video and video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), and watch them full screen, one after the other. It’s free and open source.’

I’ve tried this kind of software before. But yesterday, when I installed Democracy Player, for the first time I really saw where this is all going. I think due to the neat way it presents the channels.

More importantly, I’ve actually been using it to find and watch videos. The full screen video quality is smooth. There is a bit of a slow down on the PC when you are downloading several videos (hope they can tweak that).

My favourite channel so far is Media Rights. It makes me want to get out and make videos about the things I care about.

I recommend ‘Fast and Reliable’ about a cycle courier (with a difference). I was touched by this film. Meanwhile ‘Battleground Minnesota’ also made me sit up, as the star Chris (also known as ‘Hip-hop activist Shakademic’) looks very like another (but different) Chris from Minnesota whom I know.

It’s day four of Videobloggingweek2006.

A quick video.

Bill Gates, the $100 laptop and Windows XP.

It’s day four of Videobloggingweek2006.

One of my friends has said the music in my videos always sounds the same.

I think it’s true and a consequence of me using Acid Pro to make ‘music’ from loops. That combined with the fact that I’m just not very musical.

I really want to keep away from having any commercial music in my videos. The fact is, you are infringing copyright even if the music is at a low volume in the background and you just happened to pick it up.

Channel Four’s FourDocs website has some excellent information about copyright and other legal issues that affect UK videomakers.

I’ve found a couple of places that offer free original music in exchange for a credit. Now I just need some videos to go around that specific music!

Recently I spent some time building a completely new soundtrack for some video of a Manchester gay event from 1991. In the original footage, half a dozen music tracks from the time can be heard quite prominently on the soundtrack.

I took some crowd noise that I’d recorded at another gay event. Made up some (hopefully) Hi-NRG-sounding loops in Acid Pro and added some echo to them to make it sound as if it was all happening ‘live’ in Sackville Park (which is surrounded by tall buildings). A car-interior effect was added to one scene and a few seconds have some original sound that included no music.

Hugely time-consuming: a couple of hours to fix up a one minute clip. Here it is.

I think it works pretty well. You may think it’s ‘fake’ but, the fact is, TV and film editors do exactly the same thing all the time.

Currently many bloggers and other sites are getting away with using copyright material in a way that traditional publishers and TV companies wouldn’t dare. It is especially serious if they have ads on their site and are earning an income. I reckon the media companies and music industry will start picking on them very soon…

Updated on 14 April 2006

In the world of online video, things change almost weekly. Just when it seems I’ve found the ideal format for the videos on my site, along comes something better and it’s ‘all change’ again.

Then there are the developments with the hosting and listing of videos: iTunes, blip.tv and YouTube, RSS feeds… More people are getting ever-faster broadband and inexpensive portable video players are just months away… It’s all pretty exciting.

I’m switching to Quicktime (.mov) for the videos that are embedded on the page. I never thought I’d use Quicktime, but I like the way it works now. There will also be options to download either Quicktime (.mov) or Windows Media (.wmv).

Windows users may like to check out the free Quicktime Alternative player which will save you having to install the official bloatware. Though you’ll have Quicktime already if you’re installed iTunes.

Up until now, putting up two versions of each video meant that I was rapidly running out of space on the server. But now I’ll be hosting some of the files at blip.tv.

You probably won’t even notice, but you may like to check out blip.tv as I think it is the best video sharing service around at the moment.

The Guardian Technology Blog reports that Opera 9, which is currently a technical preview, has support for BitTorrent.