Every time I go into the Software & Hardware forums, I see new threads that basically link to a webcam and then ask the question "is this good for brickfilming?" Although it's okay to ask for advice, it's pretty easy to make sure a webcam has the right requirements for brickfilming. And besides, most of your responses will be "get a QC9k" anyways, so the threads are pretty pointless.

When you found yourself a webcam of which you think "hmm, this might be good for me", it's time to do some research. Most webcam manufacturers have a website where you can find a lot of specifications on the webcam you found. A quick Google search for the name of the webcam (for example: "Microsoft Livecam VX-1000") will get you the webcam's page on the Microsoft website instantly. If you can't find any specifications on the webcam because there appears to be no website of the manufacturer, or because the page has not enough info, then chances are the webcam isn't that good.

One of the first things you will want to find out about is the webcam's resolution. This is basically the height+width (in pixels) your webcam can take pictures with. Make sure to find the true (native) resolution instead of going with an interpolated resolution (which is basically enlarging a lower resolution image until it's big enough); a lot of webcams have this interpolated feature to make it sound more fancy. Generally you will want a minimum resolution of 640x480 for your brickfilms, though higher would be nice.

Then you will also need to know about the webcam's settings. Can they be set at manual? Which can and which can't? For brickfilming you will want to have complete control over things like the white balance, exposure time, brightness etcetera. Most webcams nowadays have the possibility to put all of these settings on manual, so this is not a big concern.

Last and most important of all, does the webcam have manual focus? This is very important as manual focus is critical to making your minifigs look sharp on screen. If the website says something like Fixed focus, it's useless for brickfilming. If the specifications say auto focus however, it's worth trying to find out whether this means you can adjust the focus yourself or not; it seems that some webcams which have "auto focus" also have a possibility of you focusing it manually. Also, it's pretty important that the webcam has a very low minimal focus distance; anything over an inch would be pretty hard to brickfilm with. For example, when you can't put things in focus when they are closer than 4 inches away from the webcam, you'd have to put the webcam pretty far away from the minifigs before you can focus on them. This will get in the way of getting nice cinematography.

I hope to have helped some of you out with any questions regarding a certain webcam you found online. If you still have any doubts, then by all means ask away for advice.

- BertL