Casey Danek
How I Got The Meatball Rolling
During this year’s two Thyme In The Kitchen productions, I tried testing out some new tools and techniques. Part of the reason was from my frustration with the old ones. For example, in the Spring when we worked on Meatballs, we did part of the show at home in Agawam with our six year old granddaughter, Kaycie. As luck would have it, the video tape and video camera I used were just not happy together. When I went to load the video track into the computer, the entire segment was garbled. We ended up having to reshoot everything a week later.
The second time, I went tapeless. I had a very inexpensive HD video camera with very few “professional” controls or features. It’s really just a PHD camera (press here, dummy). Fortunately, it’s really all I needed. To make things even more interesting, I shot all my overheads with my iPhone handheld. Crazy? ... but it worked.
On To The Holidays With Toys
For our next shoot, many months later (our Holiday 2011 show shot in November), I decided to continue shooting tapeless with my cheap HD camera. Really, I think I am done with tape for good. I didn’t want to use the iPhone though. I really need something on a tripod that lets me zoom in close. It turns out that Paul McKinney, who often helps on our projects in Spencer, has a nice Canon DSLR camera. It’s a model 60D and it has HD video capability. It records to SD cards, just like my cheap camera. So, with the right lens, I knew it could do nice overheads...and no tape!
I have other friend, Richie from Worcester, who offered to come by with his own Canon DSLR. He also has a bunch of interesting lenses I could use. I was now swimming in new toys I could use. I was going to have some fun.
Paul and Richie wanted me to use both of their excellent cameras for the entire shoot. They joked about how cheap looking my tiny HD camera was. Now, I know it’s fun to play with toys, but when you’re doing work for real, you have to go with what you know. My cheap HD video camera may look inferior, but worked before, so it stayed.
I would only shoot with one DSLR for overheads.
Now, there is one problem with my HD camera. It can’t do external audio. That is, there’s no way to feed our excellent pro quality microphones into it. I ended up using a notebook computer to capture the audio feed coming out of my audio mixer. I had to do this with Meatballs, too. Now, I would have three things to worry about in my editing: main, overhead, and audio. I’ve done this before. No problem. Right?
Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
When it was all said and done, some things went very well and some not so well. There were Gotchas.
One thing about the Canon cameras is they use larger imaging sensors. This means that they can produce video with very shallow depth of field. That’s where things appear in focus over a narrow range in the image. Objects near and far are nicely out of focus and only the subject you want everyone to look at is sharp. You see this technique used a lot in Hollywood movies.
With any camera, the closer you are to what your recording, the shallow the depth of field is even more exaggerated. In this case, for example, when I pointed the camera down into a mixing bowl to provide an overhead look, with the larger sensor, either the front of the bowl or the back was in focus. Not both. If I was careful, I could make this look quite nice and artistic. That is, until someone moves the darned bowl.
I had to constantly adjust the camera trying to keep up with Pam or Lee as they mixed things and moved the bowls about. (I never use autofocus for stuff like this and I can almost guarantee it would have produced worse results had I tried. So don’t ask.)
There are fewer overhead shots in our program, now, because I couldn’t get everything I wanted in perfect focus. Some of the experts out there will say, “Well, why didn’t you stop the lens down, blah, blah, blah...” My answer, “Because I didn’t.”
Another Gotcha had to do with batteries. Normally, when I record with the studio’s cameras, I have one on AC power and the other on a battery that I know can last six hours. (Our shoots never run that long.) My cheap HD camera could run on AC and I used it that way. The Canon cameras didn’t have AC adapters, so I had to rely on batteries. I had three. One was made by Canon and two were not. I started with the Canon battery but it pooped out somewhere after an hour, between takes. I switched to the non-Canon batteries . But, because they are not made by Canon, they gave no clue as to how much power was left during shooting. So, I never knew if I had enough to complete a take. That’s risky.
Say What?
Another Gotcha? Sure. The Canon camera twice decided it just didn’t want to record anymore. It said, “Your video has stopped” on the LCD screen, or something like that. I asked Paul about this and he said, “Oh, yeah, the camera can only record for ten minutes and then it stops.”
What?
He told me he had warned me about this. I said, “When?” He told me he did that in an email message about two weeks earlier. Like I would remember.
Actually, I’m pretty sure the camera pooped out sooner than the 10 minutes because I checked the takes on my computer later on and they were all under 10 minutes before they pooped. There must have been something else going on. I read that these cameras have sensors that can heat up from too much continuous use. I wonder if they quit then, too. Hmmm...
Sounds Fishy
I ended up having problems with audio. Another Gotcha.
Normally, during a shoot, we used lapel mics and a shotgun mic on a boom. These go through a mixer and then into the main camera. Unfortunately, the main camera - my cheap HD - didn’t have an audio feed. So, I had to record audio to a separate, third device. I used my notebook computer.
For some reason, the notebook recorded the audio with sync problems. It started off just fine, for the first fifteen minutes, but got worse and worse as the day went on. So only about 10 minutes of the first part of the Holiday 2011 show’s audio comes from the good mics. The rest comes from the tiny, built-in mics on one of the cameras. I could use the audio from the cheap HD camera, or from the Canon DSLR.
I decided to use the Canon camera’s audio. It was physically closer to Lee and Pam during shooting (by a few feet) and I knew I could make adjustments in my video editing software to match how things sound. In fact, the pro-level mics - when the notebook recordings worked - sounded so good I had to degrade them to make them match the camera’s built-in audio.
Oh, and another thing. The Canon camera was handled a lot during all this recording. All of these sounds, too, got recorded. Thinks like adjusting the tripod column up, or moving it around the floor. As the camera was capturing overheads, and I didn’t need continuous coverage, I knew I could get away with doing these things. I forgot that the audio would pick up these sounds. So, I had lots to fix later on in editing.
Speaking of which...
Stuffing Squash?
There was a funny moment during our recording session. Paul was sitting in the next room. Now, once we start recording, you’re supposed to be very quiet. In fact, I usually announce “Quite on the set!” before preceding with “Action”. Then you have to be dead silent. Really.
The recipe Lee was demonstrating was Stuffing and Squash Casserole. Paul could hear her talk, but probably wasn’t listening to what everything she was saying. He certainly forgot we were “live”.
He heard her say something about “stuffing” and then “squash” and he just blurted out loudly, “Stuffing squash?”
Good question, Paul.
This, of course, was picked up perfectly by the Canon camera’s microphone.
Even though he was twenty feet away, it was recorded as if he was in the same room.
And we couldn’t “un-stuff” the squash with a retake.
Lessons Learned
I like using cameras that don’t rely on tape. In fact, I will avoid tape completely going forward. I hate tape!
I am amazed at the competence of my very inexpensive HD camera. I will always have it handy as a backup but I hope never to have to use it as a main again because it doesn’t have a separate audio input.
I really liked working with a DSLR camera that can record HD. However, the shallow depth of field has to be managed. It’s either a problem or an opportunity and I’ll take that into consideration when planning shots and lighting.
The DSLR’s are limited in the amount of time they can record. (The Canon stops at 10 minutes and sometimes sooner if it feels like it.) There may be other reasons why these cameras could stop (overheating?) So, don’t play with toys! ...know your tool for when you need to really rely on it.
I need a much better audio recording solution. The notebook will never get used again! I’m looking into a portable field recorder with inputs for this. It’s nice to have. In fact, it’s always nice to have redundancy when doing recordings.
Sometimes you just have to be lucky. When Paul blurted out his question, "Stuffing Squash?", all the mics picked it up clear as day. The editing station, on playback, reproduced it perfectly. I could cut around the segment, but it would have disrupted the continuity of the shot. I didn't want to do that. As luck would have it, when Paul shouted, both Lee and Pam weren't talking. They were mixing something. They talked again a few seconds later, and then mixed some more. I was able to clone the second mixing sound onto the part where Paul shouted and it eliminated his mistake. That was luck, pure and simple Sometimes, you just gotta have it. So, bring some with you each time!
Sunday, February 19, 2012 at 07:56PM