DV Camcorder

DV is what the early 2000s were recorded on. It is sharp without being detailed, and that combination reads as amateur video rather than as film.

It also put a camera in everybody's hands, so the look carries the sense of somebody being there who was not paid to be.

The picture is standard definition and interlaced, so each frame is built from two fields shot a fiftieth of a second apart. Fast movement shows the comb between them.

The sensors are tiny, which gives enormous depth of field. Nothing is soft, and a subject cannot be separated from the background at all.

Compression and in camera sharpening add a hard edge around every object, and the automatic exposure pumps up and down as the camera pans.

Use it for 1998 to 2007, for found footage, for a video diary, and for a scene that should look like somebody's own camera.

Skip it when the shot needs separation or scale. DV flattens everything to one plane.

VHS is analogue tape. It smears, bleeds colour and tears at the bottom. DV is digital: it stays sharp and fails in square blocks instead.

A modern phone also holds everything in focus, but it renders clean and wide. DV is 4:3 and harsh.

Danny Boyle shot most of 28 Days Later (2002) on consumer DV cameras, which let a small crew film an empty London at dawn. The Dogme 95 films used the same class of camera a few years earlier for the same reason.

The model adds a shallow background, which no camcorder ever produced. Ban shallow depth of field and ask for deep focus from a tiny sensor.

The other failure is film grain over video. Say the noise is video noise and the motion is interlaced.