How Video Cameras Work

Traditionally, the most apt name for the product a video camera produces is "moving pictures" or, as it became known, "movies." Whether done on film or a light-sensitive digital circuitry, the process does not change. A hundred years from now, no matter what technical advances occur, people are going to record images the same way, by thousands of individual images strung together.

The beginning of the video camera

The very first recorded image of a moving object occured in 1878. For centuries, people had disputed whether a horses feet actually left the ground while trotting since human eyes are unable catch the movement. An ingenious man strung together a dozen cameras and set a horse trotting through a dozen trip wires. When he finished and flipped through the images in sequence, he discovered that the horses feet do actually leave the ground. This gave birth to video images.

Addition of sound

Adding sound to moving pictures became the Holy Grail of film. It was not until 1927 that the first feature film had this technology. The Jazz Singer was the first film made available to the public that also included sound. The first words spoken on film were "You ain't heard nothing yet!"

Film vs. Digital

Many directors still prefer working with film versus the digital video camera. With film, squares of chemically treated plastic pass quickly through light exposure, essentially "burning" the image to the paper. When these images run in sequence, a moving picture is produced. Digital cameras use the same process, but do not "burn" the image. Rather, they store the images digitally, and then string them all together.

The process for video recording has changed little in the last hundred years and is sure to stay the same for the next hundred. This is simply because video works the same way the human eye and mind do -- one image at a time.