[James Richards]

Bill –
I think that backup audio feed from the ceiling speaker is a great idea. It’s a nice heads up, too, hearing how applicable murphy’s law seems to be in the corporate video / seminar world. Thank you for sharing your experience w/ this thread –

[James Richards]

Thank you Mark – some really great notes here. I’ve stepped away from my desk for dinner and some family time, so I’m working my way through the replies (I was happy to see so many), but at the moment I’m still planning on shooting the EX1 or EX3 – which could fall into the semi-pro gamut easily enough. I’ll check to see if they have the TC function you mentioned.

I also think there’s a nice note to your studio shoot idea. It’s probably a long shot, but there’s a fair argument that sorting through all the raw footage would take as much if not considerably more time than shooting a scripted lecture in a controled environment.

Thank you for your time today –

-James

[James Richards]

Thank you Nick –

I do appreciate your input on this sort of a production – thank you for taking a moment to go into more detail for my sake. I hope it was clear I didn’t mind the cynic’s edge in the first response – it was a good hint to me that you have enough experience in this sort of work to know how such productions should play out, which is always a good point of view to read-

my best-

-James

[James Richards]

Hi Eric –

Thanks a bunch for the reply. It’s great having a resource like this.

One more question realted to the Adobe production software: Have you noticed if compressing the XDCAM files straight out of PPro CS5 is significantly slower overall than exporting native and compressing in Media Encoder (from my experience w/ the apple software, that is the case), or does PPro handle compressions speedily (relatively speaking).

– James

[James Richards]

Hey Nick,

I feel you on the cynicism. I don’t know anyone in this business that hasn’t had to walk away from gigs because the client had an unrealistic view of what it takes to make video happen. I’ve not had a lot of experience in this style of video, but I’ve had plenty of experience dealing with client’s expectations.

What I’m looking for in posting here is some positive critical feedback – the community’s suggestions for techniques and technologies that will help streamline a large content capture to a single camera. I intend to let these threads mature for a few days, do some research on the options available and go back to the client with the best solution for all parties – keeping their price points and my labor fees in mind… it’s sort of a ‘you get what you pay for’ thing, and I’ll let them know what that it (but I want my assesment to be based in some solid research – hence our current convo).

I totally agree that taking the entire seminar is excessive – but as best I can surmise, if they’re breaking it up into 90 segments at an average of 6 or 7min (as little as 2, up to 15) a pop – that’s approx a quarter of the footage captured. A 4:1 ratio isn’t extreme.

But let me know specifics if you’ve captured something like this in the past. What was your workflow? Did you feel it could be achieved in a more efficient manner? What equipment worked best, etc. I’m all ears for that sort of discussion-

James

[James Richards]

Thank you Mark,

I agree about the harddrive – I wasn’t clear about this in my first post, but I was thinking that a larger drive hooked up to the EX or HVX, like a firestore or similar, would be able to catpure a day’s footage at a time, download overnight and go at it again the next day (though I admit I haven’t yet researched the sizes of these devices – I assumed a version existed that could handle approx 8hrs in one of the formats mentioned in my first post).

I’m really hesitant to commit to DV tape for this for a couple reasons, but the main hestation comes from the client’s complaint with the previous attempt (the footage I mentioned in my first post), which was that the videographer ‘missed moments’ of the presentation. I assesed after a few questions that this was from tape changes. I was thinking the larger harddrive would take care of this.

But I really like the idea of feeding the video to a DVD recorder w/ TimeCode burn-in as I capture the content to a Harddrive. Could you point me to some links / recommend some gear options that I could research for this? If I could hand them the raw TC DVDs at the end of the day, that would be fantastic (as long as I can get the same TC attached to the digital files). Is there a way to generate TC from the camera and burn that onto the DVD? Or to send the same TC to both? With this workflow I could just give them the DVDs and reference there edit points in the digital files.

To touch on the switcher set up – I actually pitched the client on a 2cam or 3cam switcher set up (Wide & CU on presenter w/ a reverse angle on the audience) but they shot it down due to costs… unfortunately.

Thanks again Mark – Looking forward to your thoughts.

– James