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Mark In

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM

           

What camera does the San Francisco Chronicle use to capture online video footage for its website?

Canon XH A1

Called “the voice of the West,” Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco Chronicle is now the eyes of the Bay Area with its online video footage. Among the top five national newspaper websites visited daily, the Chronicle's staff photographers capture their online video reports using Canon XH A1 camcorders, which do double-duty shooting still images for the paper as well.

The Chronicle's photo-department management saw a demo of the Canon XH A1 camcorder at a tradeshow, and after learning that it not only shoots high-quality widescreen video but also digital still images — which can be captured at full-HD (1920×1080) resolution in either video or still camera color space — purchased four units. Knowing the importance of the Internet to the future of the news media, the HD camcorders were immediately put to use by two full-time still photographers to shoot video for the website. Since then, additional photographers have been outfitted with the XH A1.

When the XH A1 camcorders first arrived, staff photographer Carlos Avila Gonzalez (pictured above) was only familiar with Canon still cameras. The user interface of the XH A1 camcorder, however, enabled him to quickly learn the new medium.

Footage shot for the website can both supplement articles in the Chronicle and provide additional content that is exclusive to the Web experience. “With multimedia, because space is not at as much of a premium as it is in a newspaper, you can produce these wonderful multipicture slideshows,” Gonzalez says. “You can also have sound — people telling their own story, the ambient sounds — and I think that's what really made us realize that video was a natural progression.

“Being able to shoot video is really reshaping the way we think in terms of how we gather our stories and produce these packages,” Gonzalez says. “Now we have a lot more flexibility; it's not just a single picture in the paper. You can have multiple pieces that come together. Before the Web, you had a very finite environment to work with, but on the Web, you have expandability. You have the ability to go in, produce something, and seamlessly keep adding to it. You can't do that in a newspaper because the first part is already gone; you can't go back and add pictures to it after the fact. With the Web, because everything is linked together, it really creates a more complete storytelling package.”

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