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merge the two together.
Ok, moving to a limited control. What does a limited control capture?
It's similar to
a control capture in that it's normally another hotel or some sort of conference
center.
But the difference is it's usually in a developing country
or a very rough facility.
And the problem with that is
unstable power. Most of the time; I was in India for example,
where we'd loose power three or four times a day.
And so when you're using stable power that becomes a big issue because it forces you
to be very self reliant and to bring your own power with you.
Again, limited lighting. The lighting a lot of times can be very harsh or flicker even, which is
very distracting. So we have to deal with that as well, again
having to bring our own light
or trying to use the best set-up we can with the available light.
Also preparation time becomes very high when we start getting into
the limited
control senarios because, again,
you have to factor in so many different things that could go wrong.
And chances are they probably will.
So this is just an example. This is the room in India for example,
I don't know if you can see in the very top corners up here are these little lights. These were horrible
fluorescent lights that they had that would just constantly flicker and create
a strobe effect almost.
And we would loose power in this building
probably about four times a day.
So everything was run battery operated
and so forth just to try to get us through so even if the power went out
we could still be recording.
Some of the issues, again, variable conditions. You never know what you're getting
until you get there.
A lot of times when we're setting up and planning out these projects
we don't really know what our facilities are going to be until we actually set foot inside of there.
So that can be
a pretty big issue.
Again, can't rely on the power.
For these types of setups, usually it's only one camera. Again,
we might have two totally dependeding on the actual client
and what they want out of it.
But again, it's on battery power.
Still using a tripod, still trying to get the best
video possible.
Laptops on battery power.
Usually in a case like this we don't have any set up audio system so that means we are relying
on the assistance of our wireless mics.
Which has its own set of problems with
the actually frequency, having disruptions with that, or just having
actual power, making sure
wireless mics batteries don't die
and so forth.
So then moving on to the third
arena is our field capture. And the field capture
personally, I think is one of the most fun because you're out there, you're doing it, you're experiencing everything.
But it has a lot of drawbacks to it, a lot of issues.
So a field capture is usually on location. That could be either domestic
or abroad.
But that usually means you're out there. You have no control over the conditions
and that can be very hazardous to yourself and to the actual equipment.
No power available, so all your power has to be self supplied.
So you have to make sure you have lots of battery backup, lots of
you know, you need to bring a generator
if the
scenario allows for that.
And you are usually stuck with only available light unless you are fortunate enough to have enough people and
enough equipment
to actually bring some lights out onto the field.
So usually when we do these types of captures it's usually one person. It's usually myself or one other
person.
If we're lucky we've got two.
So a lot of times you are stuck with using just available light
which is not very ideal.
So this is just a real quick screen capture.
This is from the shoot in Rwanda and so this is an example out in the field.
There's a lecture being given out in the field to local farmers
and we're trying to capture that.
You know again,
some real simple issues that we deal with: weather conditions. They change rapidly, you never know what's going
to happen.
That can lead, obviously to damaged equipment
which is never good.
A lot of times there are physical limitations. Crawling over logs,
climbing up mountains and goig through swampy areas, stepping in raw sewage a lot of times
which is never fun.
The glamorous part, you know.
So for the setup when we try to do these
it's normally just one camera. In this case obviously on battery.
Tripod is possible, sometimes because of the terrain or the way in which this is set up
it's just not feasible to always pull out a tripod and set up.
A lot of times it's even a physical limitation
of being crammed into a corner so much that we don't even have the equipment with us to set
up
a tripod.
And normally we are always on a wireless mic in this
instance.
Very rarely would we do anything other than that.
So doing all these, we've done now,
I've done like four of these international style ones with varying success.
And we've learned some things when it all goes wrong,
and believe me it does.
So batteries batteries batteries. It seems that time after when we depend on them the
most is when they fail.
Have as many of them as you can
and make sure that you test them because batteries seem to be one of the biggest weaknesses
in our experiences anyway, of capturing stuff out in the field.
Laptop problems. Your laptop will freeze. It will freeze at the worst time possible, it's just
gonna happen.
It's Murphy's Law and it seems to be,
it never fails.
So the biggest thing that I can stress is to plan ahead for equipment failure.
You should be going through this
as you're setting up, as you're preparing.
You should plan for every single piece of your equipment
to fail
so that you know when it does, what are you going to do
in the field? Because a lot of times these are events that are happening one time
you don't get to say stop and restart this and do it over, is just to keep going.
So you need to have an idea in the back of your head
when something does fail what do you do about it?
Because the last thing you want to be is in a scenario where all of a sudden your
wireless mic batteries drop out and now you start to panic because you're not getting any
audio
and you're missing the entire reason that you flew half way around the world for
in the first place.
And the key thing to remember is it's not "if" your equipment fails, it's "when" your equipment fails.
Now obviously the higher and better equipment that you get
will help with this I think, but
it's still a matter of "when", so be prepared.
And how do you prepare?
Practice practice practice.
Use your equipment, pull it out time after time. Set it up,
go through the process, go over it again.
And when you think you've mastered it, go over it one last time. Because chances are when you know your equipment inside and out
when your on the field and stuff goes wrong,
you'll know better how to actually
fix it or roll with it and make adjustments so you can keep going on the fly.
So if we have time
this is just a quick little video
that was put together behind the scenes of our last trip to China. So this is a nice controlled environment that we were shooting in.
Shooting in three, two, one.
Hey everybody, just want to go over real quick: we are here in Shanghai China doing our lecture capture.
Right now
I will just walk you through our setup that we have here. We have our big video camera set up here with two audio inputs.
We have both the English version and the Mandarin Chinese version coming in here. So we will be recording both audio tracks simultaniously then we can later
separate them out to go with the video. Along with our video camera we've got two different laptops setup
to record both the English version
and the Chinese version of the actual powerpoints
the presenters are going to be going over.
This morning we kind of made a last minute game change and we altered the way we are going
to do this.
We decided to go with a more secure setup,and that's running the actual audio hardline right into the camera.
Previously what we were gonna do is have two different cameras running reduntantly to the laptop that will record in Camtasia.
Do to some issues with Camtasia and the fact that they don't really support that,
it makes it a little unstable so we decided to go more traditional and safe.
Hopefully everything goes smooth today, and see you on next time. Ok so here I am,
I am going to pretend to be Sean for a second and show some video taping. So just wanted to say hi to MSU Global. We're doing good here, eating lots interesting foods
We've got everything all figured out, everythings all calm and we've got the gameplan going on.
Alright, go. Alright, here we are again just finishing up the workshop capture here. Everything went smoothly,
we've got roughly about 20 hours worth of video
we've got to go back and edit and all that business.
So the easy part's over.
Yea, everything went well, we ended up going with our backup capture plan.
So that's pretty much it. We'll get back to it.
Alright, here we are in Shanghai in the tallest building in the world, apparently. Up here on the 100th floor way above the top of our city getting some free time in while we're here,
getting some shots of the landscape. It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it. We might as well, right?
So that was just a little quick video on behind the scenes of what it's like
on a nice capture.
But anyway, that's my time.
Hopefully some of this information was valuable to see how it's produced.
So thank you very much.