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Looking for suggestions for a custom camera setup
I do a heck of a lot of one-man-band studio projects that have an untrained, semi-skilled lecturer with powerpoint and sometimes teleprompter. Need suggestions for camera make and model. Here’s how I will use them.
I want to put two broadcast-worthy standard-def cameras so close together that the eyeline of the speaker from twelve feet away will look the same, whichever one they look at. The cams will be at the back of a large box that’s essentially a prompter head, fed by a large LCD below.
This pair of cameras will give me composite video of medium and tight shots I can live-switch to tape or Hard Drive with the powerpoint, to liven-up the lectures (a huge time-saver for me). The talent doesn’t need to have any skill knowing where to look. They can just look right at their slides in the prompter screen.
Cameras need a composite out, genlock if possible, adjustable zoom lenses (that one might be negotiable, since once set they’ll never change), and a good quality SD picture in 4×3 aspect. And be cheap as possible. What’s good for this in a grand or less range?
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3 Replies
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I would look at the tiny little Canon HV20 or HV30. GREAT images, especially considering the dirt cheap pricetag. And they are so small (about the size of a large man’s fist) you you could put them very close together… could probably get the lenses just a few inches apart.
I’m not sure, however, if you can genlock these cameras (or any cameras in the sub-$1K range).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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The genlock would be a bonus, but I have frame syncs with TBC’s that I can lock them up with for the main control room switcher, or a stand-alone video toaster that will lock them in as well, and I could switch with that.
Getting something close to a live-switched finished product will cut my precious editing time and hard drive space significantly for these lectures, leaving just a slight polishing job instead of longer hours digitizing and locking slides to key frames. You can’t always get unskilled talent to do the speech over, or do it better, in a useable time frame. It’s mostly about adapting to a client demand for doing these and to make what they do as transparent an experience as possible for THEM, while making my processes more efficient and speedy and easy, and getting the best look I can out of sub-optimal situations.
I looked round for something to do this off the shelf but didn’t find anything quite with all the precise features I wanted in the price range I could afford. I think I maybe could do this thing with three grand, two of that for the cameras, the rest for the big custom first-surface beam spliiter, a recycled LCD monitor panel to bounce off it, and the wood and paint for the enclosure box.
Picking the cameras will drive the rest of the design. I’m wondering if sub-$500 handycams would be enough, in a well-lit studio.
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[Mark Suszko] “I’m wondering if sub-$500 handycams would be enough, in a well-lit studio.”
Could be… especially if lighting is right on the money and depending on what the delivery format is, and all that good stuff. Our GM has some kind of few-hundred-bucks handycam that he sometimes takes when location scouting, etc. It’s pretty darn amazing what those little guys can churn out.
But yes, and again, lighting lighting lighting.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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