Saleem here. Here’s a video we recently put together about telemedicine research in India by a Sanford professor. We’d love to get your feedback.
Rob DiPatri handled camera setup, recording and lighting; I did the interviewing and editing (though there was a lot of nice overlap as we were helping each other out).
The idea was to make a quick video that intros what Telemedicine is and how it’s being evaluated.
Tech specs follow. [Though, content-wise, something pretty similar could have been made with any HD camera, a lav (clip-on mic), and iMovie].
SHOOTING: The original interview was 15 minutes long. Rob shot with a Sony Nexcam, and the room we were in had nice natural light that Rob supplemented with a Lowell Tota Light. He clipped on some blue gels to give it a daylight feel.
Two glitches interrupted our filming 1) The clips fell off the gel at one point (Rob says this is something to watch out for with the Lowell Tota light kit, the gel clips are not very sturdy) and 2) a pigeon crashed into the large window behind us. (Rob points out that when you’re wearing headphones, this sounds a bit like a gunshot).
Our interview subject remained impressively calm during both falling gel and pigeon impact.
Sound: The sound was recorded via a wireless lav mic.
The room was a little echo-y, (I ran some noise reduction, but that doesn’t have much effect on the echo).
Video Settings: shot at 1080p, 30frames per second.
EDITING: The video was edited in Final Cut X.
I know this software gets a lot of hate, but it’s just crazy fast when it comes to importing and editing. Like Adobe Premiere CS5, you can start editing pretty much right when you plug in an SD card or hard drive with files. There’s very little time lost to rendering.
The basic maps were made in iMovie’s standard map generator (included in all iMovie versions of the past couple years, I think), exported as .mov , and imported into Final Cut X (it was just way quicker to use the generator built into iMovie than to try to create from scratch).
The final project is 720p. This allowed us to use cropping (fake-zooms) on the original 1080p video to avoid pure jump cuts (feel free to let us know whether you feel this was a good decision).
(One area where I feel like I need to improve is color correction.)
The background music is courtesy of incompetech (great source for royalty-free music by Kevin MacLeod).
This was our first little collaboration, and we’d like to make this series better as we move forward. Please help us out by giving any critique you can offer, both on the technical and artistic (i.e. is the narrative easy to understand? how could we have improved it?) aspects.
Thanks,
Saleem
Great job. It’s amazing how one of the small cameras like the Sony Nex Cam and a single light can come away with a nice looking interview. There are a lot of professionals that get attached to a particular look or only one way of doing things when these days there are endless workflows that produce great results.
The gear is so available that the bottle neck these days is a good script and the energy to get out and ‘do it.’