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New Corporate Video Equipment
I am currently working at a hospital doing corporate video, we use 4 Canon HF R21 camcorders, and are looking to improve our quality. We do a lot of on location shoots and I am editing in FCPX. For sound we have a shotgun, a zoom mic, and several lavalieres. We have been alright with sounds so far, but our quality, no matter how much it is edited is still not great. Most of our videos are online, and we do no broadcasting at all. We are looking to buy 3 cameras, at around $1,000 each.
Your help in this would be appreciated!
Brittany
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14 Replies
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Well, to get to an “appropriate” camera, you may need to move your decimal point a bit.
Cameras like the Canon 32GB VIXIA HF G20 Full HD Camcorder or Cannon XA10HD might be more suited.
But you don’t say anything about the lighting you use. If you’re shooting in just available light, that’s one big problem right there. Your existing cams are not that great in low light, and lighting isn’t just about making things bright enough to *see*, but to make them look as good as they can. If you can elaborate on how you shoot with these (Do you use tripods, for example, ) and how you edit (what editing system, what shooting formats, codecs, things like that), and how you output your finished product, we could better advise.
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As far as your audio quality goes, you should invest in good equipment – and bear in mind that the hospital is one of the absolute worst places to get quality audio due to all of the machine noise, air conditioners, equipment, background noise…if you have the time, you should learn (if you don’t know it already) how to sample the noise floor in your audio, then remove the noise in Audition. It will greatly up the quality of your final product.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Hi Mark,
We use 3 soft boxes (a savage quartz light kit) for indoor lighting, and we use standard tripods for all of our cameras. I import from the camera hard drive to FCPX and export as QuickTime h.264 and then upload it to either Wistia or Youtube for embedding. I do all of this on an iMac.
I looked at the cameras you sent, they look great! Do you think that they would work well with all of our equipment?
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I agree! We have the worst problems with sound. Before here, I had no formal training in sound, mostly only studio with lavalieres. Do you know if there is a good site where I can learn to remove audio channels in audition? I have the program already, I just haven’t had the time to mess around with it and like you said, it would definitely make a difference.
Thanks!
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WhatI don’t undersand is what you mean when you say your quality is not great now. What exactly is it that you don’t like and want to improve?
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Here’s a good place to start, Brittany:
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/audition/cs/using/WS58a04a822e3e5010548241038980c2c5-7f30.htmlAnd a good place to continue:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/572518
Go over these, and you shouldn’t need to know much more about noise removal. But if you want to dig a bit deeper, Focal Press books are just about the best technical books you could want in your library:
https://www.focalpress.com/books/details/9780240807201/
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
This is great! Thanks Joe!
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Mark,
The actual video quality doesn’t seem as good as it could be – it’s very grainy, especially when I add in stock footage as b-roll. The sound quality can be improved, but Joe from this post gave me a few places to start on that so now it is mostly the grainy picture I am worried about, which I am assuming is our cameras. The cameras that you mentioned earlier have much better specs than our current cameras and so I definitely think that will help!
Brittany
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It may be the light sensitivity (or lack thereof) of your camera’s sensors that’s causing the noise in your imagery. Try shooting some footage outside, and compare it side by side with your studio footage. If the outside stuff looks squeeky clean, you may find that you just need to throw more light on your set shots, to enable you to lower your ISO settings. Do you shoot with all of your camera settings on Auto? That may well be your problem.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
If possible, please put up a few seconds of sample footage so we know what we’re talking about. use everything the way you have been using it, the same lighting, sound, etc. don’t make any changes yet, so we have a baseline for comparisons. ( A “differential diagnosis” so to speak)
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