Lights! Camcorders! Action!

Video cameras plugged into computers are helping people make home movies of Spielbergian quality -- well, almost

Most of the 10 million Americans whose shoulders have sprouted camcorders over the past five years are happy just to point their whirring lenses at anything that moves -- drooling babies, blushing brides, cops beating up the citizenry. But in the great rush to see their lives replayed on TV, who can be bothered to edit the gems they have recorded? Result: the world's greatest collection of truly awful videotapes -- a vast library of raw footage even more droning and banal than the reality it purports to document.

There is, however, among the vast majority of mindless "cammers," a rare...

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