Equipments and number of crew to be an event videographer?

[Chip Thome]

Going in with your post production background, you should have a good idea of the shots you need to make a nice video of the event. If I were you I would start with that, putting together your list of what you think you need and want to capture. Then look at each of those “scenes” and determine what additional gear may be essential to capturing both the video and audio that you need. Depending on what is planned for this party, you might want to go with a locked down wide shot on your tripod and use your 600D as the roving B Roll cam. In that case I would get a shotgun mic for the B Cam to get any interviews with the guests. The locked down cam’s internal mic, although not great, will work to mix in the ambient sounds from the room. If there’s to be music, a digital recorder plugged into the audio source for the music should give you nice audio from that. I’m not sure about the lights, but you know the venue and the ambient mood they are going for.

That list should give you some nice footage and audio to work with and give you pretty good coverage that you should be able to handle yourself.

[Brent Dunn]

lcd4video.com has reasonable pricing for equipment. An on camera LED light for only $100.

External Mic or an Zoom external recorder for better audio.

Budget dictates production. 2 camera operators are better than 1.

Brent Dunn
Owner / Director / Editor
DunnRight Films
DunnRight Video.com
Video Marketing Toolbox.net

Sony EX-1,
Canon 5D Mark II
Canon 7D
Mac Pro Tower, Quad Core,
with Final Cut Studio

HP i7 Quad laptop
Adobe CS-5 Production Suite

[Tom Sefton]

Hi Christian,

We’ve used the 550D, 7D and 5D MKII for event work and it is worth remembering that the maximum file size it can generate is 4GB. This roughly equates to around 12 minutes of video per single shot, so if you have anything that is going to take longer than this you need either:

a different camera
or
a second camera and operator that will co-ordinate the stop and start of their shots so they can be synced in post later.

You will also need plenty of memory. 24GB should cover an hour of footage, but you will need a laptop there that you can dump the footage to, and an external HDD to back it up. If you have 2 cameras, you would require around 48GB of SD card memory (to ensure that whilst dumping footage off one camera you can continue shooting). Your worflow on the day with 2 people will consist of constant shooting and then dumping card memory to your laptop.

If your laptop is powerful enough, it might also be worth leaving it to convert all of your files from H264 format to cineform avi’s whilst you work – this will help you in post.

Also – when you come to edit this footage together, keep in mind that standard hard drives won’t have fast enough data rates for you to play back more than 2 layers of footage on your timeline, and even basic effects will stretch the playback. You would be better off with a RAID0 array, a Solid State drive or a GSpeed unit.