If England is a nation of shopkeepers, then the U.S. is a nation of
hotrodders. From Thomas Jefferson’s hillside plows, through Alexander
Graham Bell’s harmonic telegraph, to Randall Smith’s Fender Princeton
Guitar amp mods, Americans have modified existing devices and made them
faster, better, clearer and louder.
While some hotrodders achieve "inventor" status and become rich and
famous, most tinker in their workshop improving off-the-shelf products
for themselves and for the rest of us.
The automotive hotrods I worked on weren’t muscle cars or street-legal
dragsters. I grew up in an era and locale devoid of cheap gas and
quiet, straight country lanes. My friends and I faced gas lines and
twisty mountain roads. We rarely called ourselves hotrodders, but
that’s what we were. We took stock cars and made them perform better.
Like all hotrodders, we started with a car that balanced low cost with
base performance.
In my crowd, a popular car to hotrod was the Datsun 510, a poor man’s
BMW. We’d make the standard performance boosts like lowering the
suspension and installing Weber carburetors. By building on Datsun’s
engineering, our relatively easy mods did pull more performance out of
the car.
Today people are doing the same thing with camcorders. The 510 is the
automotive equivalent of cameras like the Sony DSR-PD150, Canon XL1 and
Panasonic AG-DVX100. I mean that in a good way. It takes solid
technology to build a good hotrod. Only an idiot would hotrod a Gremlin.
Mods Like No Other
Greg Winter didn’t like the audio performance of his Sony VX2000. He’d
heard about the audio mod the BBC had made to the VX2000 camcorders, so
he got a service manual and developed his own.
In brief, he built an alternative audio path. With the camcorder’s
audio input set to Manual, a +4 dBu audio input to the camera’s RCA
jacks skips the camera’s unshielded flat cables, mic amp and VCA. Those
components are the source of the hiss heard by many PD150 owners,
including me.
You need to use a mixer to convert mic signals to +4 dBu, but that’s a
small hindrance to get the reported 20 dB S/N improvement on a PD150.
Winter has developed mods for five Sony cameras: the TRV-900, VX2000,
VX2100, PD150 and PD170. The cost ranges from $200 to $300, depending
on camera model.
Except for the audio hiss, I like my PD150 a lot. I haven’t had my
camera hotrodded, but I’m thinking about it. You can learn more at
Winter’s site, www.gregjwinter.com.
Rather than removing flaws, other hotrodders extend their camera’s
capabilities. Several have hotrodded small-format DV cameras to work
with 35mm still-photography lenses. The key goal is to shorten the
depth of field on these little cameras to generate a more cinematic
image.
I’ve seen the results of a few of these mods. James Webb’s clever but
unwieldy adapter places about a dozen spacers, filters and macro rings
between the lens and camera. The footage looks good, but these days
Webb’s working on his films, not his adapter.
One of the most promising is the Micro35 Project by James Hurd. Hurd is
a design engineer and that experience shaped his approach to a key
problem that had afflicted other lens hotrodders. When he couldn’t find
the parts he needed, he engineered his own. The results are pretty
impressive. You can view some footage and find out more about his
plans, kits and preassembled adapters at www.micro35.com.
There are other camera hotrodders out there. Juan and Jeremy at
ReelStream hotrodded the DVX100 (and soon the Canon XL2) to output raw
uncompressed video through a USB 2.0 port (www.reel-stream.com). The Kinetta camera from Jeff Kreines and Martin Snashall (www.kinetta.com)
is more of a Shelby Cobra or Formula 1 car, but their 10-bit 4:4:4
1080p handheld camera grew out of Kreine’s desire for a no-compromises
HD camera that satisfied his inner verité filmmaker. They found the
parts they needed and built the rest. One final note: Hotrodding isn’t
borne out of necessity. Cars and cameras work fine right off the lot
and out of the box. But a hotrodder sees untapped potential. A
hotrodder takes a small part of the world as it is and stretches it
just enough to fit the way he or she sees the world, sort of like video
production.
Post your comments below
