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One Camera…or Two?
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Mark, You’re very modest…a nice quality. There might be others out there who know what you know, but you express yourself in a very eloquent and concise manner.
The most bizarre thing happened this morning…I received a phone call about shooting a seminar for nurses (different video than my original question)and she is going have power point throughout the entire 6 hour seminar with 5 presenters. I told her that you can fit two hours of decent quality on a DVD and that she would 1 DVD for each speaker. Do you agree there is no other way around this?
Then she asked for a price, so I told her I’d get back to her with a proposal by the end of the day. I know there are a lot of Grey areas when it comes to pricing, but do you think $6K is too much? This is for a 2 camera shoot, with at least 4 mics, lighting and post production, which includes multi cam editing, titles and the encoding/burning of 5 separate DVD’s.
I can’t see doing it for less, but not sure of the client’s expectations…sticker shock. I told her that “people think shooting a seminar is a simple process, but there are a lot of elements involved and you want it to look professional…if not, you should get a camcorder and do it yourself.”
Jeffrey S. Gould
Action Media Productions -
Lots of good material here, but I’m gonna disagree with the idea of trying to mic the audience. It’s a nightmare and hardly ever gets more than barely adequate sound unless you set up a stand mic and make the audience shuffle up to ask their questions directly to it.
Which is silly in and of itself, cuz the audience isn’t typically relevant, only their QUESTIONS.
So go ahead and set up an audience mic, but not for the soundtrack, for your reference.
Then in post, instead of hearing the audience questions, just SUPER the question as text (concise, clearly worded text) as a lower third over the beginning of the properly recorded answer.
The viewing audience will “get it” immediately and you don’t have to worry about audience audio at all.
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Anybody that knows me is having a good laugh at your “modesty” reference.:-)
The way our gear works at my shop, we stick to two hours for DVD’s as well. I tried using a slower 4-hour rate on the Panasonic DvD recorders we have, but got into problems with customer player compatibility and the compression just destroyed he quality on what are often very shaky graphics to begin with, when you’re using powerpoint as the source.
If anything, on a purely time for hours basis, the $6k you bid may actually be low. You need to know before you talk to anybody about a project, what your true costs of business are and what your hourly and day rate needs to be, just to break even as well as to make a profit.
Then take a long look at what kind of time goes into those six complete hours. If you plan to do a lot of editing to polish them up, your profits to hours ratio goes lower, though the finished quality will be better. This is one reason that for big all-day lectures it can sometimes be a better deal overall to live-switch a multicam feed and just be more or less done with it at the end of the day. Costs more up front but saves time. Six-plus hours of raw tape can equal six hours of digitizing, twelve hours of editing, plus the time you took to shoot it and whatever time it takes you to dub it off. Be sure that whatever you decide to charge that you are billing for ALL the work you’re going to do.
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I would say it depends on what the client wants, plus sometimes its not just about a simple question, but comments, conversations, opinions, and the like also. Bill, while you are correct in your description of captioning questions, that technique is less handy when you’re trying to cover things in terms of a Socratic give-and-take.
For some situations, captioning a question works fine, for others, the audience will think you’re doing it because you couldn’t get decent audio. If you can grab the audience on their own tracks, you can bring that up just when you need it, and keep the overall noise level down.
Such matters of audio policy are best discussed with the clients beforehand.
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I’d like to take this off on a different tangent for a minute. While I shoot a LOT of powerpoint stuff, I never really LIKE it.
First off, while there are a few people out there that know what they are doing, most powerpoint slide shows are horrible quality, technically speaking. Much of the blame for this I put on Microsoft. Powerpoint was and seemingly remains designed to cram a lot of visual information into a small memory footprint as the prime goal. It also was and remains oriented towards looking at it on a computer screen from arm’s length away, at most.
What this gives us are graphics that come out of the starting gate with particularly poor resolution for text, compared to what comes out of a dedicated video character generator or broadcast CG software. And nowadays they are almost always projected on a large screen, though never composed for that. Often the colors and brightness levels can exceed NTSC safe levels. On top of that, the built-in “wizards” most users rely on when composing the slides, don’t format the slides very well for video in a 3×4 ratio, I can’t wait to see what they do for 16×9. The themes are often of poor contrast, or poor color choices, the font default choices are bad for video, and they may add a lot of distracting stuff.
You can get around a lot of this if you are an experienced presenter. You can build better custom themes and backgrounds yourself, either in Powerpoint or Photoshop, and use powerpoint as just the shell mechanism for transporting and presenting the image stream. Won’t be as compact a file done that way, but can look WAY prettier. There are also services and artists out there that can create extraordinary and striking slides for you, using all the best principles of graphic design. I just never get to see that kind of work. If I get a really heinous slide show, sometimes I’ll offer to rebuild it in PPT or just export the text data into a real CG and build better resolution “real” TV graphics. Depends on the time and budget available, and how high-visibility the project is. You have to pick the hill you want to die on, after all. Not every project deserves an Emmy-winning effort.
But leaving all that aside, there is an even bigger issue to me.
I don’t think lectures with powerpoint are very good television.
I don’t mean just from an entertainment perspective. I mean as effective use of our medium.
The true power of video is in the combination of sound and images, juxtaposed and combined to create more meaning together than they have alone. Its also a medium that favors broader themes and emotions, not a lot of minute detail. What I’m getting at is, there is probably a better way to communicate the same material than to tape six hours of people reading their slides to an audience that I’m pretty sure can read the slides themselves, faster. But usually, nobody is willing or able to do that work, find the time for it, or pay for it. It requires much more effort to take the client’s information and synthesize a script that tells the story of that information most effectively. Powerpoint’s format for organizing a presentation is also IMO a tool of the Devil. It puts the emphasis on building an orderly outline of bullet points, not on synthesizing an understanding of the material and getting that across to an audience. Not every message really fits the one-size approach of powerpoint. I feel it’s use in early grade school classes as “technology training” is a horrible mistake, churning out kids that can’t compose a proper report or truly organize and understand information. Ed Tufte points out places in corporate and government where these powerpoint shortcomings have led to trouble, including the Shuttle Discovery disaster.My opinion is that ppt slide shows are often not the best way to communicate the information, just the one that people find most convenient and cheap and expedient to do. I’m not saying that every slide show has to have the quality of an epic film. Sometimes the pure data itself is so engaging to the target audience, your best strategy is to just to shut up, get out of the way and let them see the charts, graphs and tables with a minimum of distraction. I think that’s an exception rather than the rule.
On the other hand, in those situations, those charts and graphs and tables could probably be communicated just as well if you just made a PDF file of them or a hypertext web page, that’s self-navigating.
Ask yourself if the data on these slides couldn’t just as easily be sent out as a email instead.
If that’s the case, isn’t it part of our duty as communication experts and facilitators to tell our clients there’s a better, perhaps cheaper way to tell their story? Don’t we owe that to them, to at least suggest there’s a better way? Reading a book on tape is not television, nor is it usually something we should be calling effective training. What we are challenged to do in those situations is to prize out the parts of the live one on one presentation that really DO communicate and teach, and make THAT the focus of the video. The rest is detail to print out in a manual.
When people say video training doesn’t work effectively, my guess is they don’t really have any to start with. Not really. They have “radio with pictures”. They have recorded a “book on tape”. This is where somebody with experience in Instructional Design could be a great help, to get them moving in a better direction.
For more on why you should hate powerpoint as much as I do, wiki or google the terms powerpoint and Ed Tufte. For a real hoot, google the search terms “Powerpoint” + “Gettysburg Address”, and see what evil can be done when the way the technology is applied is a mis-fit for the message.
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Thank you Mark. That’s a complete tutorial!
Regarding “Reading a book on tape is not television, nor is it usually something we should be calling effective training,” I totally agree with that. I have this client who wants me to make a training video where he wanted the WHOLE SCRIPT be part of the subtitle. I told him that, not only will it fill the whole screen, it will also take away the viewers attention from the actual demonstration that we’ve shot… or vice-versa. I told him that it’s not how video works. But since I don’t want to lose the job, I went ahead and put the script on screen but begged him to let me edit it so it doesn’t fill the whole screen.
Can I quote you and put your post on my website? It’s very very informative and I’d like to educate some clients. Thanks and God bless.
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I’m just a guy. You should quote Ed Tufte.
That guy has credentials. Read up a little on him and his theories about clear visual expressions of data, and of graphical interfaces.
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Another voice in support of reading Tufte.
His book, “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” remains the gold standard for understanding how to present information to an audience.
Plus, ya gotta love someone who appears to hold such vast contempt for the typical PowerPoint presentation in business!
FCP since NAB 1999
creator: muti-track movies
http://www.starteditingnow.com -
Wow… great thread here. Kudos Mark for another informative post!
One thing I like to do with pp or any on screen graphics is keep my digital still camera hanging off my tripod and shoot a still of each slide. You can color balance, straighten perspective and adjust contrast in photoshop afterward.
“everything is broken” ……Bob Dylan
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Rennie, that is an excellent idea…I’d keep my digital camera on a tripod and use a remote to trigger it. I asked one of the two possible clients if I could shoot the PP on a different day and have them go through a mock presentation and they said yes. Sure it’s more time for me, but the end result will be more controlled.
Jeffrey S. Gould
Action Media Productions
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