There are times in film mak­ing when you want to be able to cap­ture envir­on­ments that des­troy nor­mal equip­ment.  There are times when you need to be able to get a strange view point of the action.  There are times when you need to be able to leave the cam­era run­ning and con­cen­trate on some­thing else.  These are also times when a full size cam­era would inter­fere with what you are shooting.

For all these times you need an ATC 2K.

That is, if your primary deliv­ery method is online via You­Tube etc.  For the budget film­maker, the cost of a high end solu­tion often is pro­hib­it­ive.  Wire­less micro cam­era kits can cost any­thing up to £1000 and the qual­ity can be any­thing up to HD.  I am not quite at this point yet for two reasons:

1. I am only an ama­teur film maker.

2. I need some­thing that doesn’t mind being in the mud.

I chose the ATC from Ore­gon Sci­entific and I have never looked back.

Kit and specifications

The basic kit comes in a simple blister pack which holds the entire unit onto a shelf.  Inside you find the cam­era and a mount­ing kit.  The basic specs of the cam­era are as follows:

• Cap­tures video clips with sound
• Three select­able res­ol­u­tions: 640x480, 320x240 and 160x120 pixels
• Video clip file format: AVI — 640x480, 320x240 and 160x120 pixels
• Two frame rates (15fps and 30 fps) for all three resolutions
• With built-in memory (32Mb) and SD card slot for memory expan­sion (Up to 2Gb)
• Water­proof
• Low-battery man­age­ment

The unit is small and slight:

The front lens sec­tion is sur­roun­ded in a hard wear­ing rub­ber, which pro­tects the recessed lens glass from dam­age. On the top sec­tion are the con­trols and the screen dis­play­ing the cur­rent set­tings and record­ing time left.  The con­trols are three buttons:

The top one turns the unit off an on when held down for a few seconds.  The middle big but­ton is the start and stop record­ing con­trol.  This beeps to let you know what is hap­pen­ing when the unit is being used when moun­ted.  The bot­tom but­ton changes the qual­ity of the recording.

Behind this is a move­able mount­ing ring which can be spun around the cam­era to aid in mount­ing. At the bot­tom of this is the clip that con­nects the cam­era to the vari­ous mounts via a slot in the mount base.

Behind this is a water­tight back­ing case that screws on/off and cov­ers the cam­eras innards.  When this is taken off you can access the SD Card and batteries.

Also included in the box is the mount­ing kit.  This enables the cam­era to be moun­ted in almost any pos­i­tion ima­gin­able.  The basic mounts are a bike handle­bar mount and flat plate mount.  It also includes a rub­ber mount­ing strap and a fab­ric one.  The rub­ber one is per­fect for mount­ing to a hel­met or any­thing plastic.  The fab­ric one will hold the cam­era steady on any­thing else (like skin).

In the field review.

I have used this cam­era for over a year in all pos­sible con­di­tions.  I ori­gin­ally bought it after com­ing back from a ski­ing hol­i­day and find­ing my clumsy attempts to record while mov­ing were very poor and had almost caused an acci­dent.  I bought the cam­era on www.amazon.co.uk along with a 2GB SD Card for a total of £100 (see the end of the review for the cur­rent prices and offers).

Since that pur­chase I have used this baby in almost every pos­sible envir­on­ment and it has per­formed brilliantly.

Here goes the list, along with how it was moun­ted and a video of the event hos­ted on YouTube:

Air­soft­ing.

Air­soft is the com­bin­a­tion of paint­ball and mil­it­ary sim­u­la­tion.  It is one of the most adren­aline fuelled sports in the world today ad played in the UK alone by over 10,000 people.  I play for a top Lon­don team called FCS DarkAn­gel and make videos of our play.

With the DA’s I have used the cam­era in a gun moun­ted position:

In this con­fig I have attached the cam­era to the front of my rifle using the rub­ber mount and black-tape.  The cam­era cap­tures the play per­fectly and is very use­ful in sort­ing out any cheat­ing after the match.  The weight is neg­li­gible to my play and I  have yet to crash it against some­thing.  I have seen the cam­era take dir­ect hits to the lens (as shown in the video!) and it has suffered no dam­age whatsoever.

I have also used the cam­era in a hel­met moun­ted mode.  This works very well when using pis­tols in games as the head is no tilted down to aim.
 

Next, I have used the Cam­era in both Sky diving and Bungy jump­ing!
 

In these modes the cam­era is attached to the wrist by the rub­ber strap.  In both situ­ations the small size the of the cam­era meant that the offi­cials involved with both sports allowed me to film.  Many other people with cam­eras were turned away.  Both events cap­tures two very unique angles that could never be cap­tured on nor­mal films.

Tubing.  Tubing is a com­bin­a­tion of swim­ming and drink­ing.
 

Water and strong drink are both things that don’t nor­mally film to well.  In fact it is nor­mally death to both parts of foot­age.  Not so with the ATC.  Firstly, it is totally water­proof for swim­ming.  I wouldn’t take it deep diving, but as you can see from the film the cam­era shrugs off water and mud with no prob­lems.  Secondly, using a cam­era in the middle of people dan­cing can pro­duce strange reac­tions.  Some people do not like being filmed, some like it too much.  A nor­mal size cam­era obeys the Law of Observer Effect. That is, if you observe some­thing, you change it.  Hold­ing a big cam­era would wreck the nat­ur­al­ness of this foot­age.  Not so with the ATC.  Most people simply didn’t notice it, nor me film­ing with it.  A real bonus.

Com­ment­ary.

So what’s not so good about it and what have I noticed in my time of using it?  Here are some comments:

1. The bat­ter­ies last about an hour.
2. Which is lucky as so does a 2GB SD Card.
3. You get 1 hour of foot­age on a large card at the best resolution.
4. You need to use a good qual­ity card to get the best per­form­ance.  Do not use a cheap one.  My card is the high end Scandisk II.
5. The sound is not bril­liant and I tend to cut it from the record­ing in post production.
6. Speak­ing of sound, any­thing hit­ting the cam­era causes a peak in the volume that is ear splitting.
7. The film qual­ity is what it is.  This is not a HD cam­era so don’t expect it to be.
8. The lens angle is slightly for­wards and tight, so you must prac­tice to aim the image ‘box’
9. After sub­mer­ging the lens can need a blow to clear water or whatever.
10. The low light per­form­ance is not bril­liant at all. I some­times use a strong torch on the top of the cam­era in low light.
11. Usu­ally I get 20 minutes of good foot­age every two hours of film­ing.  Out of this 10 minutes will be prime stuff.
12. I attach it and fire and for­get.  The cam­era will power off when not in use.
13. I render the foot­age using Sony Vegas, but Win­dows Movie Maker works fine. My 10 minute movies in You Tube format are usu­ally 100MB in size

All in all I can­not recom­mend this cam­era high enough.  I have cap­tured events that would have been lost forever with it and for the money it is a real no brainer!

**UPDATE!**

OS have just released a new ver­sion of the ATC, the 3K for the same priced I paid for the old one.  This new one has a good num­ber of fea­ture upgrades includ­ing a wider angled lens.  Go for it!

You can buy the ATC 3k from here:

Hope you get one — if you do please link me the footage!

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