Shooting All Day Presentations

[Mike Petty]

Looks like I am going to have to shoot s series of presentations around the country and I want to use my 7D (and most likely a new 60D as a b camera). I tried to convince the client to bring the speaker to one venue and spend the day doing a simulated presentation but noooo....

The issue at hand is the 12 minute limit on recording on both the 7D and the 60D. I understand it...I am just looking for advice on how best to shoot these infernal presentations in light of the 12 minute limit.

It will just be me (no assistant) in a fairly large venue. 1 camera as the master for CU and medium shots and the other at another angle.

Thoughts...recommendations...alternate career suggestions?

[Chris Medico]

You will wan to stop and reset one of the cameras before it stops on its own. Then repeat the process on the other camera so the "pauses" are staggered. Pick a time range between 8-10min each so you can find a good window of opportunity and know the other camera has usable coverage for whats happening.

Thats about the best you can do.

[Buba Kastorski]

From my experience some 7Ds have overheat problem and some don't, mine has, and to cool it down takes a bit more than couple minutes, so I would use 60D as A cam, cuz again, from my experience 60Ds don't have that overheat problem;
I would keep a 2-3 min gap between 2 cameras recording starts, and as Chris says reset record every 10min, how you'll be recording sound?
good luck!

[Donald McPherson]

Might be worth buying a couple of stopwatches to help keep track of time.

[David Chilson]

You might be able to do this for an hour or two but an all day presentation and by yourself? Let's work this out...If you changed your card every 10 minutes that would be six cards an hour times two cameras which works out to 12 cards an hour. So in a morning 4 hour session you would need 48 cards. Throw a couple in for spares and your at 50. Seems like a lot of cards.

That's what I would need because I wouldn't even think about trying to capture footage, backing up the footage, reformatting and reusing cards during a session, that's a recipe for disaster. Oh and besides I will be too busy making a nuisance of myself attending a camera every five minutes because that's what happens.

You start both camera's at the same time. Change the first one at 6 minutes to make sure you can get to camera two at 10. Six minutes later I need to get back to camera one and then oh four minutes later to camera two......You want to do this for eight hours? It's going to take a lot less time than that before somebody at the presentation finds this very annoying.

I'm old fashioned, for a gig that was described as an "All day presentation" I would make sure there was something there that could capture an hours worth of footage at a time and it's own audio, as a backup. Heck, one of those cameras that still used tape would be more than sufficient and give you piece of mind which I think you would need if you attempted this with two DSLR's. Just my two cents.

[Keith Dobie]

Excellent advice offered so far, just a few more quick points:
- This sounds like a job for two camcorders (how many hours do you expect to record per day?) As was pointed out by David, the logistics sound tricky. Make it simple so you can concentrate on the speaker, not the gear.
- Having a zoom controller on your tripod arm will help a lot. Much better than racking on the lens.
- Power from an external DC power supply is recommended if it's an all day shoot
- Do yourself a favour and get/rent an external (6"+) HD field monitor for your main camera
- Don't forget the audio . . . you will def. want to be able to monitor with headphones and be able to switch channels so you can really hear what is going on. Can you do that with the DSLRs?

Good luck with it!

[Mike Petty]

Thanks guys for all of the input.

I was hoping I would not have to haul the EX3 around but that seems to be what I will be doing.

It will be my A cam and then I can use the 7D as sort of a roving b cam. Makes the sound easier too. I can run the lav right into the EX3 (I would have use a Zoom for the 7D with the lav piped into that, BTW).

Sees that there are few SxS cards in my future.

Thanks

[Jon Fairhurst]

One option might be to leave the cameras in Live View mode, but without recording on the CF card. Record to an external device via HDMI. The main problem (on the 5D2 anyway) is the zoom box. I can push the box out of the way and get roughly a 2:1 clean aspect ratio. That means you can scale up slightly and crop to get a 2.35:1 aspect or scale up more aggressively and get a 16:9 aspect. If the end result is 1080p, this could be questionable. If 720p is acceptable, the more aggressive cropping should be okay.

Of course, this requires a good HDMI recorder/encoder and large enough hard drive. You will have aliasing, but no h.264 artifacts. I calculate about 100MB/s to record uncompressed 24p 4:2:2. (1920 x 1080 x 24 x 2) A 1TB hard drive would store about 10,000 seconds or 166 minutes, so you'd either need a large RAID or a real time compressor.

One PC, an HDMI capture card, and a 4TB RAID per camera would do the trick, uncompressed. This sounds a bit ridiculous, but if you already have a PC and large RAID for editing, getting an HDMI capture card will only set you back another $200 or so. Some cards even support audio capture too.

Hopefully, the PC would do fast encoding, as you'd need to compress the result and offload the data to be ready for the next event. No matter how you shoot, managing and backing up that much data will be a challenge.

[Don Bloom]

I shoot seminars all the time, most last all day. Boring stuff to be sure BUT the question is how to on the DSLRs. It is my opinion that while one could, one shouldn't. The reasons mentioned above, card management, running between cameras, making sure you change cards and can still adjust camera A while changing the card in Camera B and OOOPS! We got a rabbit. (a speaker on stage who can't or won't stand in one place). That is way too much stress for me. Give me a good old fashioned camcorder. Record to tape, full size DV/DVCam tapes. I can get the job done as the client wants it and be mostly stress free for the day.
Almost every seminar I have ever done, hundreds over the years have a scheduled break about every 90 minutes. As the saying goes, "the mind can only absorb what the a** can tolerate". Seminar 90 minutes (sometimes a bit less or more- 5 minutes maybe) break for "10" which means 15 maybe 20, seminar for 90, break then lunch for 60 (read that as 70) seminar for 90, break for "10"...you get the picture.
As far as I'm concerned a DSLR has no place in an all day seminar to record the seminar. Cut aways, B roll sure, but not for the whole seminar.
YMMV

[Keith Dobie]

Mike: I didn't have nearly enough SxS cards for a full day, so I got a Sony PHU-120R HDD recorder. I just looked at it, says 421 Minutes available when empty. One BP-U30 powered it for the whole day. Attaching a pic, you can see how it plugs in to one of the SxS slots. An option, but just not sure if it would work on your EX3 (firmware).

[Burk Webb]

I agree that the 7D/EX1 combo should be the best bang for buck/pain free combo. I've some corporate events in a similar way and it works out great. Camcorder with a TON of record time as the wide master and recording audio. 7D as the "hero' tight shot and b-roll cam.

I will suggest one thing - bring the zoom! Audio for these is more important than the video in many cases - a lot of these are just narrated power Point presentations anyway. Having a zoom plugged into the mixing board can be a great back up.

[John Wiley]

I have to agree with others here that a camcorder is the right tool for this job.

Think about how many SD cards you'll need for the DSLR's, how often you'll need to change the cards and the batteries, how you'd need to balance all that against the 12 minute record limit, the possibility of overheating etc etc.

Remember that the EX1 has an SP mode which is the same as HDV - for this kind of work it might be a fair to trade some quality for longer record times.

In any case, I'd still use a seperate sound recorder such as the zoom, just in case you unexpectedly need to change cards or batteries - you can always put some cut aways in as long as you have good, continuous sound to cover it up.

[Kin Lau]

Originally Posted by David Chilson

You might be able to do this for an hour or two but an all day presentation and by yourself? Let's work this out...If you changed your card every 10 minutes that would be six cards an hour times two cameras which works out to 12 cards an hour. So in a morning 4 hour session you would need 48 cards. Throw a couple in for spares and your at 50. Seems like a lot of cards.

You don't have to change cards every 10 min's, you're only limited to 12mins/4gigs per _clip_, not per card.

[David Chilson]

Kin,

No, you don't have to change the card every time, but you still have to attend to a camera every 5 minutes with the 10 minute "safety margin". I was thinking if I ever got crazy enough to try it, I would need all the same cards. Because I know if I didn’t do the exact same thing for the duration, I would screw it up. Trying to keep straight I had a 16GB card in one camera and a 8GB in another camera and knowing I had two resets for camera two but only one before I had to change the card in camera one. Or was the other way around? I’m confused just writing it.

Whether you are just resetting or resetting and changing the card you are handling the camera. When your job is to capture long uninterrupted footage, handling a camera every five minutes exponentially increases the chance of mistakes, such as forgetting to hit record. Which not long into hour two, I would have done. Guaranteed.

A man has got to know his limitations. I’m old and for me to do that job I would take my two A1’s, with two different sources for audio and hour long record time because of my dozing time. Sometimes when you are old you tend to nod off at these presentations. Matter of fact some of my best stuff was captured while I was sleeping! This would never be possible with a dslr……

[John Wiley]

Haha David, perhaps the OP should use DSLR's. That way he won't get bored at all because he'll constantly be attending to the cameras.