[Mark Suszko]

I’m not much help but I’d go a different way, add a shotgun mic to a smartphone which can already do the a periscope thing.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve been using a soft rubber wedge-type door stop for this kind of thing for years. I like that it fits in my fanny pack or pocket.

One time by pure chance I happened to have it on me at an event, a bill-signing ceremony kind of thing, when a late-arriving camera op with a small cannon GL had no tripod ready, and no spot left to put it, as about ten of us were all in a tight scrum around the desk on tripods already. The tardy camera op was quite at wit’s end: he had no shot.

I motioned to him to hand me his Cannon, zoomed out full wide, hit record and laid the camera on the end corner of the desk, and of course the vertical angle was wrong, but I reached into my pocket and whipped out the doorstop in front of everyone and wedged it under the front until the elevation of the lens framed the Governor and the scene… perfectly. It was truly cinematic-looking and totally impromptu. A cooler shot than the one I had, actually, but I was shooting for news, not drama.

The other camera ops all looked at me in wonder, and one asked; “how did you anticipate needing that AND having it in your pocket?”

The true answer: After so many years, you learn some stuff.

“Because”, I said in a low, gritty whisper: “I’m the goddamn Bat Man.” Grinning, they nodded assent and we went on with the gig. Got a couple high-fives as we broke down after.

Yeah, that was a good day.

[Mark Suszko]

Camtasia is a long time favorite on Windows.

[Mark Suszko]

Izotope is the expensive solution that would commonly be applied to this, but as the man says, some of the frequencies will overlap and what’s left may not sound as good as you need it to.

[Mark Suszko]

” I usually decide to end the shot when people are done talking.”

I LOL’d at this. Sign me up for her MasterClass:-)

Kids today, (the old man said), have it easier.

When I was seven, for fun we made photomatic flip-books out of Polaroid stills, and for junior high I got a super-8 mm camera and projector, with the splicing block built into the lid.

In High school, we learned to shoot on Sony reel-to-reel porta-packs in black and white,

manually insert-editing machine-to-machine between two reel-to-reel EIAJ half-inch decks without a controller, just a grease pencil to mark the tape, and the counters on the deck. “Pre-roll” both tapes manually winding them back seven seconds, start them at the same time, (like the launch keys in a SAC missile Silo), watch the counter wind down, look for the little tick mark on the edge of the tape, mash the DUB/EDIT button and hope you didn’t hit on a sync pulse, or you had to do it again.

I shot news packages and a one-set sci-fi short, based on a short story out of an Asimov Magazine. That was fun but also tedious, but mine wasn’t even the most ambitious project… we had one student in class that animated stop-motion cartoons that way. That kid was insane.

[Mark Suszko]

Annnnd I found the list view/picon toggle, silly me. Still doesn’t answer the P2 symbol question, though

[Mark Suszko]

OK so my stupid question for today:

I finished the OS and FCPX upgrades, apparently without incident. But I must have made a change somewhere in how things look and work when importing.

What I’m used to is to hit the file import command, and the import window opens up to my RAID, a Promise Pegasus. In the listings of files, it *used* to list everything on that drive as lists of folders and lines of text, in windows fashion, but two things are different now: the icon in the import window for my RAID has a little “p2” logo symbol next to it, and I have NO P2 drives currently connected. What’s up with that? I mean, I WILL plug in a P2 eventually for some thing, though normally I copy my cards to the RAID first. Why is that icon associated with my RAID in this way?

Secondly, Instead of a list view of the possible files to import, I have picons, loads and loads of slowly loading picons, the thing seems to want to show me every file in the RAID as a picon, and that’s not what I’m wanting. What do you think I did, and more importantly how do I get back to simple list views in my import dialogue box?

Picture of what i’m talking about:

[Mark Suszko]

Kyle, I think what you linked to is more like a routing switcher, a sort of valve that can let any one thing at a time go thru and throw it to a projector or video wall. You’re asking about putting up multiple things simultaneously. For that, you could use an actual video effects switcher, you know, with rows of buttons marked for camera 1,2,3, etc. and inputs for graphics sources and video playbacks, and controls for cropping, scaling, and moving the images around within the video space.

There are also boxes called screen splitters or multiviewers, that will allow you to put multiple inputs onto one screen, and if your needs are truly modest and never-changing, maybe that’s enough to crop and scale one camera and a powerpoint screen into your monitor or projector. You can think of these as the devices used in security systems to show multiple security camera feeds on one monitor. Here’s just one option. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/multiview

There are also sophisticated multimedia presentation apps like Wings and Stumpfl, which I’m not really qualified to talk about. Others in this forum live and breathe that stuff and could better advise you on the utility of them.

But for worship applications, many churches are happy using a Newtek Tricaster, which is a sort of all-in-one “tv studio in a box”, that gives you the video camera switching, character generators for text and titles and even scrolling song lyrics, special effects, and digital motion video playbacks, all neatly integrated. It also records the show to internal memory and can stream it live too. They are a kind of “Swiss Army Knife”, and come in various levels of cost and ability. There are other ways to do the same thing – another popular option these days is based around the Black Magic Atem virtual switcher, which runs off a PC platform.

The flexibility of a video production switcher lets you handle a lot more things on the fly IMO than a simple scaler or multi-view splitter.

If you check out the blackmagicdesign and newtek web sites you might see something that works for you there. You can also shop B&H Photo-video’s web site with a search for Video Production Switchers and set it to list by price to see what level of capability is generally available for the budget you have in mind.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s the impression you might get, if you only skimmed the thread….

[Mark Suszko]

Dunno: first you have to do the conversion from quarts to nits:-)