[Mark Suszko]

A go pro is great for this, coupled to a power supply of some sort – but, there are advantages to using a webcam instead. Axis has been my go-to choice for this kind of thing in the past.

Benefits:

The stills are archived off-location. Go-pro, self-contained, could get stolen or damaged, and you’ve lost all the shots. Some go pro type cameras can be set up to be seen remotely, via Bluetooth, but I’m not sure they can be set up as webcams. A dedicated webcam has it’s own internal server that stores AND forwards the grabs to a safe archive, at whatever intervals you need. You can even program it to skip night times or hours after work has stopped, and only shoot during relevant times.

You can check on it remotely from anywhere, any time.

You or the client can review the lapse as it is being built, instead of having to wait and see if you’re getting it right.

You need a weatherproof case like a Pelco or similar, power source and connectivity. The contractor can run a power line and ethernet cable to the camera “perch”. Or you could use a wireless modem and solar panels.

If you’re committed to just making multiple visits with a conventional camera, I’d suggest you build a rigid mounting point at the site so the camera can be reliably re-positioned to match each time you go. Set a steel pipe in a concrete footing, screw on some kind of flange and make a sort of quick-release to fit. Bring along a monitor that’s been overlaid with a gridded outline of the first shot in the series, as an alignment tool. That could be done with a laptop and various apps.

[Mark Suszko]

Doing the pans and zooms in post can work – it works better, obviously, if your base shot is 4k. I do this in my ukulele concert gigs for my unattended cameras: shoot an HD wide shot, manipulate the pans and zooms in post with keyframes. It works best when the camera is super-close to begin with. Your “high up in the cheap seats” distant shot will not look as clean because even in HD, you have a limited number of pixels to blow up. A 4K recording would help.

There’s a number of things you could try regarding the tripod and technique. Some involve expense. Moving your hands off and locking/unlocking are issues. You want more spring tension and more fluid drag to start with, so you can hold the shot without using the locks. Be sure the camera is balanced to naturally return to the right level, hands-off, and you won’t spend all your muscle energy holding the shot. With a well-balanced camera and head, you only need fingertip pressures to hold a shot or initiate a move.

If the camera has LANC connection ability you want to add an aftermarket zoom controller to the arm of the pan head. Vari-Zoom controllers have a useful speed adjustment knob that can really slow down the zoom speed to a crawl. If your zoom rocker has enough sensitivity, you can use the “pinch technique” on the rocker switch instead of just pressing on it with the finger or thumb. Over the years, that’s my main technique for smooth zooms: you pinch the front and back of the rocker, the finger tips acting as drags and stoppers, and roll the entire wrist, to make the rocker move the very tiniest fraction.

Pan moves will improve with added mass on the camera and head to dampen shake, as well as with using longer arms. You may consider getting a heavier tripod and head than the camera needs, just for the stability.

I would recommend an inexpensive gopro knockoff, the iconntech, around $50 or less,

https://www.amazon.com/ICONNTECHS-Megapixel-Viewing-Waterproof-Camcorder/dp/B01F759GKC

that you locate somewhere to get a cut-away shot, and this lets you eliminate showing the beginnings and endings of your live camera moves in the edit. You could also mount it on top of the current camera, if there’s no better place. This one ugrade will seriously improve the overall professionalism of your work. If you can put a gopro or iconntech on a mic stand and get it up near the stage, …maybe hook it to the conductor’s music stand, digital pans in post from that will be amazing.

Finally, the Rode shotgun is nice, but if there’s a PA system, you should look into connecting to it with an inexpensive digital audio recorder, (used around 50 bucks for a Tascam DR-05 or similar unit) and mixing the board audio with the live “wild” sound from the shotgun. Or put the audio recorder up closer to the stage, if you can’t tap into the PA system. Poor video is more tolerable if the audio is really good. And nobody watches good video for long, if the sound sucks.

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t mind doing roto work, but it’s always best to avoid it as much as you can. One trick that might work, since the bear is whitish, is to go into color correction and dial up a very high contrast and saturation, and play with color limit tools, (the “Pleasantville” effect) in order to make a scene that’s ugly to the eye but easier for the luma and chroma keyers or difference keyers to work with in generating a “hold-out-matte”. Build it from the bear-out, or the environment-in. Either way.

Take the initial result of that and apply additional masking/roto to it until you have a perfect “hi-con” black/white mask layer, then stack that between the original bear layer and the new arctic layer, apply some feathering.

[Mark Suszko]

Genlocking makes the cameras easy to cut between when using a switcher. it syncs the cameras to the same time base but does nothing about the CRT you’re shooting. It’s not going to help with your problem as stated. Variable “clear scan” shutter will synchronize each camera to the refresh rate of the CRT, you have to “dial it in”, adjusting until the flicker and traveling line goes away. It’s very much still around, on broadcast quality cameras, which you may not be able to afford to buy, but certainly can rent. Prosumer camcorders aren’t going to cut it.

[Mark Suszko]

Kevin, Mpeg Streamclip is indeed righteously good.. but if you’re in the mac world, it’s doomed by the next OS upgrade, which “breaks” it. So you might need to look deeper into Media Encoder just in self-preservation.

[Mark Suszko]

It may be because of *contrast* .

Walls behind the light sources may be too dark in relation to the lights hitting the talent. The eye’s iris wants to open up, because of the relatively dark wall beyond the lights, but the lights then seem too glare-y. The eye strain translates into headaches and fatigue. This is something that bothers older people more.

Before they shut you down, you could ask them to let you try an experiment, and wash the wall behind the lights with a soft light to just bring the contrast ratio down a bit. Also, add more diffusion to the LED’s and try to push them farther to left and right of the center line, get them out of the direct eyeline of the talent.

[Mark Suszko]

Shooting analog TV CRT’s, what you’re looking for is a video camera with an adjustable (variable) shutter rate – Sony’s name for that feature is “clear scan”, but other camera makers also have it on mid-range and higher-end broadcast cameras. That’s what gets the shutter to blink at the same rate as the electron beam sweeping across the CRT is “painting” the video line-by-line. You don’t see this feature on many consumer-level camcorders, so, you may have to rent from a broadcast Video rental company. It’s not much use on CRT’s any more because CRT’s are mostly extinct, except for a few niche applications – however, it remains useful to reduce flicker from some types of LED lighting.

[Mark Suszko]

Your first critical pick would be a writer and a producer. This could be one person doing both jobs, but they need to be experienced. Everything and everybody else, you could rent as needed. And the producer would take care of that for you.

But without a good plan and good scripts, nothing else you spend money on is likely to pay off.

[Mark Suszko]

AE is the usual tool for this, but you could take a still from the video into photoshop, use the clone stamp and/or gradient tool to extend the existing white and blend it out to fill all the frame space you need. Then use that as a layer under the original video, crop with a feathered edge, done.

[Mark Suszko]

The best thing would have been to get an HMI light in there at the shoot time, so your inside light and exterior were both at the same level and color temp. Or, You should have gelled the window, which can be hard to do on a tall building with big windows…. I have a trick for these situations that often helps, but you have to do this during the shoot: Lock down the camera on a wide shot and shoot with the talent lit well and let the window either blow out, or mask it with paper, green screen cloth, anything, really. Next, take out the talent and their chair, shoot the same locked-off shot but now exposing only for the window view. Stack these two or more tracks and adjust composite modes and/or mask/crop the window, layer, and you get what the eye is expecting: well-lit interior with visible exterior.

You can’t go back time to do that now, but you CAN play with stacking multiple identical video tracks and adjusting the blending (composite) modes and the opacity of each layer, as you apply color correction independently. And you still may have to do a multi-point mask, or even a sky replacement on the window, using keying and/or motion tracking… depends on the shot. The bottom line is: this will look better if you can adjust the talent’s color grade independent of the window view’s grade.