Video Production: The Lighting Factor

Yesterday, we were lighting up.

No, not the cigarette kinda lighting up. We rented a bunch of lights and examined the difference it makes in the quality of video. The camera will open up its aperture way more, if lighting is inadequate and degrade the overall quality of the picture. We have used lighting before, but not in the right quantity and positioning.

Our main concerns, were

1. The obtrusiveness of the light mounts to the local audience
2. The correct strength of lights
3. Correct positioning of lights

Here is a video clip from the event showing the video quality as being close to SD television:


Lights used:
2x1000W from the front
2x300W on the head/shoulders from the back

The other feature was the use of multiple cameras all positioned together to get wide/closeup shots. Thanks to Dan of Russel Video for the tip, who supplied the lights. This reduces staffing needs, with a multicamera setup. We fired up our good old Tricaster for achieving live editing to broadcast over Mediasite.

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Photo Credit: Paul deSousa
Light Rental Funded by the Vic Divecha and Brian Dunn

Problems with video recorded at 29.97 frames per second and Camtasia

There are many instances where we need to retrofit video from sources like DVDs or web cams as picture-in-picture for screen captures. Screen captures are done at rounded frame rates like 5, 10, 12, 15, etc. NTSC Videos from traditional cameras, however, are not always recorded at such rounded figures.



When such video is brought into Camtasia studio, to be synchronized with a screen capture doing a lecture, these two elements of video will start going out of sync has the time progresses in the video presentation.
One solution is to rip the DVD at 15 frames per second, or some other rounded figure. This way the Camtasia production output will not be thrown out of synchronization when produced for the web. I use Handbrake for converting a DVD capture from rack-mounted DVRs like Grassvalley in the video lab, which performs quite well and gives all the twiddly knobs a geek can desire. It even works with DVD format folders containing VOB files, when one of our partners simply gives us the files only over the network.
Hope this will save you some hours of trial and error. While searching for help on this topic in Techsmith forums at the time of writing this blog post, one can only come across discussions that talk about exporting at 29.97 frames per second from Camtasia, but rarely a discussion about bringing in footage at this frame rate.