A common mistake I've seen with newbee directors when shooting in the field (documentary, movie, etc) is that they will watch the action directly instead of watching it on a monitor. What the director seea and the camera sees are two different things.

If you ever see a hollywood director he will be watching a video monitor and listening to the audio through headphones, thus he sees what his audience will see. It is also a way of double checking focus, lighting, composition, audio, etc.

You don't need anything fancy. You just need a device that will display video and feed it direct from the camcorder.

We use a couple of Sony DVD Walkmans which are portable DVD players with an external video input or output. They did not do well on the market, and are available inexpensively. They are self contained, but there is no built-in speaker. They can also be used as portable DVD players and can feed video and audio out to a separate monitor. I have seen new units on eBay for under $80.

We will be using one of them as a camera viewfinder with our cine adaptor mounted on our GY DV500 (mounted upside down, with a hood). It's mounted upside down because the image becomes inverted when passing through the monitor.

Any display with manual control of briteness, hue, contrast and color (or saturation) can actually be calibrated to NTSC color bars which most camcorders have built-in. The only feature they don't have is blue screen or blue gun. This turns off the red and green while you balance hue. You can get the same effect by viewing the screen through a blue gel or filter. This technique can also be used to calibrate video editing monitors to give you a better idea of color when making color adjustments while editing.

This technique is not as good as using professional monitor, but far better than nothing.

Ray6