Hauz Khas is a quiet green spot in the madness which is Delhi, with tourist appeal and historical significance. These photos are from my 2004 visit. Note that the gallery below now includes Jantr Mantr and other sites in Delhi.
ps There are some nice boutique shops and at least one great restaurant nearby.
The formal presentation accompanied by slides and followed by Q&A is standard fare at conferences and other corporate settings. It makes sense to capture these on video whenever possible, so that you can re-use the material and get greater returns on the investment that the presenter (and the company) have made in developing the presentation, traveling to the venue, etc.
So what’s the best way to video these things? I have a few suggestions, based on LOTS of experience.
The setting is usually a large room with a podium at the front where the speaker rests a laptop. Slides are projected onto one or two screens to the side(s) of the speaker.
These are terrible filming conditions. At large events the speaker may be spotlighted, but more often you’re stuck with room lighting, and have to fight with people who keep wanting to turn that down so  the slides can be read more easily. Resist this tooth and nail: you have enough lighting problems even with the room lights turned up as high as they will go.
I’ve seen people set up a camera at the back of the room, angled to get both the presenter and the projected slides in the frame, on the assumption that this way they’re capturing everything. WRONG. The slides will be illegible at that distance, and the speaker a blurry silhouette. The resulting video won’t be good for much.
My solution is to position my camera close to the front of the room, preferably on the same side that the screen is on, shooting across the room so that the speaker’s face and upper body are framed and NOT silhouetted against the screen.
The front row is ideal, as long as that’s not so close to the speaker that he/she disappears behind the podium, and also taking into account your need to connect to a good sound source. If you can’t be in the front row, you’ll need to raise the camera up enough to shoot over the heads of the audience in front of you. I usually put my tripod on a table, and use the center column to get more height (note, however, that whenever you put a tripod on a table, you are vulnerable to people jiggling the table; it’s a tossup between that and having them trip over the legs if you put the tripod on the floor).
Give yourself room to pan the camera back and forth in case the speaker paces during the presentation. Sometimes you may think the speaker is “tethered” because the podium is on a dais or stage, but don’t count on it – you’d be surprised how mobile some speakers can be in the face of all kinds of obstacles! (NB: I’m happy for speakers to move around, if that feels natural to them – it makes for more entertaining video.)
Because I zoom in on the speaker, the slides are usually not in the picture at all (unless the speaker walks over in front of the screen and gestures at the slide). As you can see in most of the videos I’ve done for Sun, I edit the slides in afterward as video overlays. To make it easier to find the right place to put each slide, during filming I try to note the timing of slide changes.
…or try to get a corner of the screen in your shot so that you’ll be able to see on the video when the slide changes.
Try to ensure that questions from the audience will be heard on the video, either by the questioners using a floor mic or the speaker repeating the question. You can’t always enforce this, so be prepared to write down the questions as well and edit them in later as subtitles – otherwise you have video of a speaker nodding wisely in total silence, then rattling off an answer that’s unintelligible without the question.
The results of all this will not be the highest-quality video, but, especially if you take care to get good sound, it will be good enough for web use, and people worldwide who could not attend the presentation in person will be grateful that you made it available.
You can see many, many examples of my video work on my YouTube channel.
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Garden of the Gods, Colorado
Disclaimers:
For whatever human physiological reason, it seems that, at least for online video, sound quality is more important than video quality.
The first videos I did for Sun had, um, highly variable sound quality. I knew that the built-in mic on a consumer camcorder was not likely to be very good so, at a conference where room sound was being run from a professional sound board, I tried attaching an XLR cable to the videocamera’s microphone jack with an RCA-to-1/8″ mini adapter. This was very unstable and prone to come unplugged, and, even when it worked, didn’t provide great sound quality. Comments on my earliest videos included complaints about the poor sound.
After a few upgrades, I currently have the following:
Beachtek mixer: essentially a miniature sound board that fits between the camera and the tripod. It has an output cable that plugs into the mic jack on a consumer camcorder, while the inputs are two female XLR jacks and one 1/8″ minijack (you can use any two, not all three). You can control input levels independently for each channel via volume control knobs on the back of the unit.
Sennheiser Evolution G2 100 series wireless mics – two lapel mics and one handheld, with wireless transmitters and receivers.
Rode VideoMic – a camera-mounted shotgun mic. Designed for use with consumer-grade camcorders, this gets much better sound than the camera’s built-in mic, and eliminates a lot of background noise. For example, this video of Mike Shapiro and Steve O’Grady was shot on a street in San Francisco with city buses rumbling by and lots of chatter from the bar we were standing outside of. The Rode did a good (if not stellar) job of focusing in on the conversation I was trying to capture, and I think the fact that we were able to do this on the street made for more engaging video than talking heads in a studio would have been.
Most of my filming is of engineers making formal presentations, e.g. at conferences. I am often a last-minute adjunct to the event and don’t have much control over the setup. Because I don’t have a huge professional camera with an enormous zoom lens, I try to get a seat near the front (but not so near that the speaker disappears behind the podium), and I beg the A/V staff on hand to give me an output from their big sound board. (These folks are invariably helpful even when they weren’t expecting me – no one has turned me down yet.)
The best sound solution is to run an XLR cable from the sound board to the Beachtek. I have a bunch of XLR cables, but have given up carrying them around because they’re heavy in my luggage, and the local A/V crew have plenty of cable and (usually) the male-female or whatever adapters we always end up needing (note to self: must buy some adapters, at least).
If the camera is too far away from the sound board to run a cable (some of these conference rooms are HUGE), I use the Sennheiser wireless transmitter and receiver: hook the transmitter into the sound board and the receiver into one of the Beachtek’s inputs (the Sennheiser kits included both XLR and mini-jack cables for the transmitter/receiver – very cool). This also gets good sound quality, but you have to keep an eye on the batteries on both units.
If the presentation I’m filming is likely to generate audience discussion, I put the Rode videomic on top of the camera and aim it at the audience. Even when the room is provided with a floor mic for Q&A, people don’t always use it, nor can the speaker be relied upon to repeat the question, so it’s essential to have a way to capture what the audience says (I have at times been reduced to scribbling down the questions myself and putting them in later as subtitles).
I’ve also filmed a bunch of interviews, usually with engineers, such as these examples in Sun’s Grenoble and Eagan offices. At the time I only had one lapel mic, so I had the subjects share the handheld, passing it back and forth between them. The problem with this is that people hold the mic differently, and the sound level you get depends on how close the mic is to the speaker’s mouth. That, plus the fact that people have different natural speaking levels, makes it very hard to get consistent sound (I can’t always react fast enough to twiddle the volume control on the Beachtek appropriately).
I would now be inclined to use two lapel mics, or have one person use the lapel and one the handheld, adjusting the input levels separately to each speaker’s voice before filming begins.
Lapel mics, at least the ones I have, are sensitive to how far the speaker’s mouth is from the mic. The mic is usually attached to the front middle of the speaker’s shirt. When he turns his head sharply sideways to look at his projected slide, the sound gets softer because he’s no longer speaking at the mic. I don’t have a solution for this yet, unless I can train speakers to turn their whole bodies towards the screen instead of just their heads. (There’s probably an audio leveling feature in Final Cut Express that would improve this in post-production, but I’m still learning to use that software…)
Nowadays, my setup often looks like this:
^ front view: XLR cable from sound board hooked into Beachtek adapter; the 1/8″ minijack from the Rode Videomicgoes into the jack at the back of the Beachtek
^ back view. Yes, it does get a little crowded back here. And this doesn’t even show the camera’s power cord attached!
