Roll Cameras

The summer solstice was on Thursday, that is the official first day of summer!  But at GrassRoots TV, we jumped the gun and started cranking our summer season on Sunday with the "Aspen Writers Foundation: Summer Words Festival".  Our production equipment won't cool down until late August.

Our cameras will roll through miles of tape, with complete weeks worth of work.  We have three field production cameras.  Each professional broadcast quality camera has a little personality of their own.

The oldest camera is Nemo.  Nemo was once our workhorse, but now nearing retirement.  It was recently repaired and got a clean bill of health.  So, it might have to wait a few more years for its pension.

The middle camera is Flipper.  Flipper is our workhorse.  It is used for almost 80% of our field productions.  It is not an HD camera or XD for that matter, but a great working SD.  GrassRoots TV is currently broadcasting in SD.  With some huge fundraising help, we'll eventually be broadcasting in HD.  Once we do the big switch over to HD, both Flipper and Nemo will have to retire.

GrassRoots TV newest camera is Shamoo.  I always want to call it Shampoo, but that wouldn't fit into our naming theme of aquatic wildlife.  Shamoo is an XD camera, meaning that it has HD and SD filming capabilities.  Shamoo would be our workhorse, if it recorded to DV cam tapes.  It records to an HD disc that cannot be easily transferred in our studio to air on the station.  Therefore, it gets used as often as it can when we have multi-camera field shoots.  It's our little colt just about old enough to become our workhorse.

GrassRoots TV also has a couple of community cameras.  The Larry Cam and the Hell Cam.  Both cameras are available for the public to use.  You can stop by and take it for a few days to use for your personal purposes.  We just ask that you return it so other community members can take advantage of the camera too.

The Larry Cam is our easiest to operate community camera.  Larry donated the money so we could purchase such a camera so the public could have a free camera to use.  That is why the Larry Cam does not fit the naming theme of aquatic wildlife .  This is an SD camera as well.  If anyone is interested in donating some $$ to upgrade our community camera, just stop by or call us 970-925-8000.  For an added bonus, we'll even name the camera after you.

The Hell Cam is our other community camera, it stays in the box most of the time.  I'm not sure the exact name origin, but I assume it's because the Hell Cam is not easy to use.  It is kind of a pain in the butt.  So it deserves that name.  The Hell Cam does have a very nice lens though.

That wraps up the background on our camera equipment.  Yes, it is all great equipment and every day we say a little prayer that it will come back safely to our studio so it can be used again for the next shoot.  Cheers to a summer with a lot of used tape stock!