Lessons Learned: Making a Live Worship DVD

Courtesy of
http://www.virgin.com/media-and-mobile/news/suffering-from-digital-stress

Recently, our church had a Praise and Worship night where we had professionals come in and record the music with the intentions of making a CD to sell. It was also decided that we make a live DVD as well with multiple cameras. The audio recording went well but the video recording not so much. I am one to plan out my shots with each camera in mind but when working with three completely different kinds of cameras it does not always come out as planned. We used our Sony HD prosumer camera, a Kodak "pocket camera" and an iPhone to get the shots. The plan would have worked since the iPhone 4s surprisingly takes good HD video as does the Kodak camera but there were two factors I did not consider that became a nightmare in post-production. The first factor simply being the human aspect and the second factor being the technological differences involved with the cameras.

I have learned that it is important to train good people to work the camera in media ministry because there will always be someone that will back out at the last possible minute and a good backup needs to be handy. During this particular event I had two people back out leaving one camera guy and myself to run three cameras. I left one camera on a wide shot and the other I walked around with which worked out great but it left me in a position to where I couldn't direct the other camera person on shots I wanted.  This brings me to the second factor I mentioned earlier. The other camera person did a good job but the quality of video was not as great as hoped. The Kodak camera does not have a manual focus setting so there were times where the camera automatically focused footage and the digital zoom caused the close up shots to be grainy. These issues left me to be extremely picky on clips and being limited on space on the iPhone led to not enough shots to make a good multi-shot video.

With a possible predicament on my hands I had to make some editing decisions about the videos I was creating for the live DVD. I used whatever footage I had that was good to create the videos and used techniques that I have learned over the years to clean up as much of the footage as possible. I have referenced VideoMaker's website numerous times in this blog but for good reason it is a wonderful resource to have on hand when you need it like working with bad footage. The lesson I learned through this process is that planning is good for a project but to make the planning worth while you should consider every possible scenario there is to ensure a successful outcome.