I can’t believe it’s been a month since the Worship conference. One of the most fun times in the pre-conference work was shooting that promo video. Now that I have a little room to breathe, I thought I’d write up a few observations on our first video shoot of this type.
Video After many months of drooling over Canon’s HD-DSLRs, I was able to pick on up a week before we shot this promo. I popped a 50mm f/1.4 on it, and away we went. For the handheld shot, I used the wide end of the 17-40mm f/4 in an attempt to minimize shake. Didn’t help as much as I would have liked. I wonder if Calvary will let me pick up a jib next year…Hmmm… :)
Sound I’ll be the first to admit that the audio in this video isn’t great. Quality audio gear designed for video is in short supply at Calvary. The church owns a great Shure wireless system, but it’s normally used with a countryman headset. I’ve seen a few promos shot with that kind of rig, but I’ve always thought it looked awful. I was able to find a low-end lapel system that belonged to the women’s ministry and wired Trav up with that. From there, I ran that into my laptop and recorded right into Amadeus Pro. Syncing the audio with the video was a bit of a challenge. I used the iPhone movie*slate app to slate the front end of the video and called out the take/file name. In post, I found the matching files and manually synced the audio from the camera to the audio from the lapel. In post, I discovered that the audio from the lapel was muddy, as the mic was obscured behind Trav’s hoodie.
Lighting *How NOT to gaff* I’m a big fan of Zack Arias’ one light workshop, and I wanted to see if I could light this project with just one light. (You know… no budget; using what was available) As we were shooting, Calvary had been in the process of upgrading some of the lights in the grid above the stage. I was able to snag a 500w fresnel that was going to go up in the grid later that week. I hung that from a speaker stand I found in a closet and pointed into a Westcott 60” convertible umbrella (reflective/black cover on). I set the light and umbrella above and to the left (see diagram). I shot back into the sanctuary, so everything behind the talent went to black. To prevent it from appearing in the shot, we taped a Fox Cities dining guide over the exit signs in the sanctuary. In the haze of 1am clean up, we complete forgot to take the menus off the exit sign; on the way home, I joked with Travis that it would be just my luck for us to have a fire inspection first thing the next day. Sure enough, we did…
Cue Cards After the first take, we decided that cue cards would be a good idea. :) We ran up to the office and printed the copy on three sheets of 11x17. We taped all that to a large piece of cardboard, and Holly held that directly behind the camera.
The Blue Dot of Death If you look closely at the HD footage, you’ll notice a small blue dot in the lower right section of the screen. Yep, the 7D’s sensor had a bad pixel. I was devastated! Thankfully, the amazing folks at B&H Photo quickly shipped a new one out to me.
Things I Would Have Done Differently Video: My biggest regret is that I didn’t close the aperture to give me more depth of field. Shooting at f/1.4 made for a VERY shallow depth of field. I’d focus before we hit record, and as soon as he started talking, Trav would lean forward—putting the focus point towards the back of his head. In hindsight; close the aperture, raise the ISO. Additionally, I need to pick up a larger CF card. Dumping the video every 4Gb is a pain… Audio: Shotgun or better lapel mic next year. We REALLY have to get the audio quality up next year.
Below is a diagram of how we set things up:
Aug 19
Here’s the 2009 ProCon promo video that I just finished… The end is a bit sloppy, but I ran out of time.
I looked all over the internet for a template for the label holder on our ADC 48 point pach pannel, and was shocked to discover that I couldn’t find anything. I took the time to draw one out in illustrator, and figured that I’d post it here in case anyone else might need it.
It’s been a full sumer at Calvary Appleton (which is why I haven’t been writing as much as I would have liked), and the culmination of that Summer was our 9th Annual Great Lakes Prophecy Conference. Although the conference is always loads of fun with the great teaching, worship, and fellowship, it presents many unique technical challenges for me.
The biggest technical hurdle this year was internet connectivity. About two weeks before the conference, our ISP began having trouble and our bandwidth dropped to less-than-dialup speed. They were unable to guarantee a restoration of connectivity by the conference. I quickly began outsourcing as much of the internally hosted things as I could (email, website, etc.), but sill, without a reliable connection we would be unable to push the live video feed to the company who hosts our stream . With an average of 1000+ hits on our stream for our conferences, this was could have been a disaster. Through an interesting chain of events, I was able to secure a 8M Down – 1.5M Up connection with Time Warner Business Class. They were able to expedite the install, and we were up and running with one day to spare. (Yeah, a little too close for comfort!)
The internet connectivity problems inspired me to upgrade our network a bit. The first upgrade was at the heart of our network—the router. I replaced an aging consumer quality Linksys WRT54G (running Tomato) with a Cisco Systems 831 that I picked up on eBay. The performance increase was quite noticeable. The built in VPN features of the 831 were a huge selling point for me, as it allows me to access the network when I am out of the building.
The second upgrade addressed some wireless security concerns that I had. For the longest time, our access points used WPA-PSK. This meant that a single key was used by everyone to access the WLAN. While this was simple, it was a huge security risk (especially at conference time—when every attendee with a laptop wants access to the WLAN.) Joe Random could approach any staff member or volunteer and ask for the key, and, chances are, they would hand out the key to Mr. Random without thinking twice. This was obviously highly unacceptable. I began researching WPA Enterprise solutions, and settled on Zeroshell—a flexible, network-focused Linux distro. I installed Zeroshell on a old, unused Compaq DL580, and using the RADUIS server in Zeroshell, I set up all of our APs for WPA Enterprise. Then I created accounts for all of the staff, and bingo, the WLAN was secured! Rolling out authentication credentials to the Windows based workstations was a bit challenging, but considering our WLAN users are mostly Mac, it went fairly quickly.
The final upgrade was, I admit, a bit of an indulgence. I picked up a Apple Airport Extreme for my office. As I am often sending huge files between my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro, the temptation of 802.11n and Gigabit Ethernet was too great. :) I’m also hoping to use the NAS features that are included for sharing files with other members of the media dept. I just installed it on Sunday, and can’t wait to put it through its paces.
Alright, I have tasks waiting for me, so I’d better wrap this up. Stay tuned; I’m planning a series on the upgrades to the Video Dept. that we installed back in spring. As always, if you want to chat, or have any questions about anything that I’ve written feel free to contact me via email: tonyk@ccappleton.org
Howdy! I’m Tony Kunda, and I’m the head of visual media at Calvary Chapel in Appleton Wisconsin. I’ve been involved in ministry since the young age of 12, and it’s been an interesting journey from playing the drums on a worship team at a tiny church to my current staff position at a large-ish Great Lakes area church.
As head of visual media, my responsibilities focus on overseeing our video dept and website, but I also have my hand in some of our larger graphic design projects. It seems that I spend most of my time here waiting for computers to render projects, so during that downtime I research the latest and greatest in technology and determine if it would help in the ministry here at CC Appleton.
With the influx of media in ministry, many churches are overwhelmed with the seemingly limitless options for spreading the gospel with technology. This blog is intended to give me a chance to explain the options that we have chosen, the reason that we have chosen them, the implementation of those options. Like many churches, the media dept. at CC Appleton operates within a super tight ministry-sized budget, so often it is my responsibility to find the best possible piece of equipment within the constrains of that budget. This blog will also give me a chance to talk about the equipment that I have chosen to aid the ministry.
I’m looking forward to sharing my ideas here. If you have any question about anything that I have written, feel free to email me. tonyk@ccappleton.org
