Illustration of equipment used for video recordings

figured i should show you the video setup we've been using for the class this consists of a number of pieces of equipment first we have a so-called light board here in the middle i'll get that in a second this is important for the pen but it's not necessarily the critical piece of equipment when it comes to high quality recording so in no particular order first you're going to need lots of black drape or muslin to avoid reflections first a black backdrop like a meter and a half or so from the screen uh so that i can get a little bit of depth of field then we have two lights ouch that's bright so these are 200 watt uh modern led lights and that's probably the minimum you should go for you need more light than you think so this one is the so-called key light that's operating at 100 here we're really outputting 200 watts and then we're using a softbox on it to well mostly to make the shadows a little bit softer and the black egg crate like net you see here that's really directing the light so that i get the light straight on me when i'm recording as you can see it exactly in this direction right but if i go a little bit off axis here in particular i don't hardly get any light at all and that's important to avoid reflections that would show up in the camera on the second side we have a so-called fill light this is a similar light but i'm outputting that and what is it 48 so it's about half of the key light and the idea here is really to soften up the shadows on the side of me that's not exposed to the key light very traditional light setup and here too i'm using a softbox and erection egg crates in the back here we have a weaker light that's roughly i think it's a 60 watt life but i'm only running it at like 50 or so so this is the light that's the back light or the backdrop light the idea here is that this one on top will light up my shoulders and my hair a bit and that really makes the lecture that you're recording stand out from the background it makes the snap and look really sharp so you definitely want some sort of backlight um and here too instead of a large softbox if i were to redo this today i would probably get a smaller smaller light that's just a big led panel but it's important that it's soft any light without the softbox or say by being at least one feet one foot in diameter is going to create very harsh shadows the muslin here is mounted on a tripod set that i got from whatever procurement agency that is just a big beam up there carrying the cloth and then i mounted the light there directly on top of that not necessarily beautiful but it doesn't show up in the recording so i don't really care i'll get to the light board in a sec the other important piece here is the recording equipment so here i have a black magics and pocket cinema camera 6k the 6k part is not important there is a 4k version too but these cameras use lenses that are either standard canon ef lenses for the 6k or i think it's micro four thirds for the 4k and we just happened to have a couple of canon lenses so it was easier to get that one the complication here is setting things up to record the light board there and me in the front and as you can see even here right there are a ton of reflections um you do not see those in the recordings why don't we see those in the recordings i'll get that to that soon the other complication here is that when i write on that light board i'm going to write so that i well i'm right-handed i didn't switch to be left-handed in all the recordings but that means that i'm writing for the opposite side so if i'm writing on the opposite side of the screen it's going to be backways one scene from this side right the way i handle this is that i'm filming through a mirror here this can't be any mirror if you do any use any cheap mirror here you're gonna get ghosting because that you get a weak reflection from the front surface and then an actual reflection from the backside so this is a front surface mirror that we got from thor labs it's not expensive it's a bit over 100 or so but then you can't get them larger than eight by eight inches that was i think i couldn't have made with the mirror that i couldn't have made it with a mirror that's one inch smaller and then we just built our own mounting device for it so that i can put the mirror on a separate tripod do you see the black lens there the reason why this is black is to get rid of the reflections so here we're using a circular polarizing filter for two reasons the main reason is this one i will show you that monitor screen in a second but this monitor is absolutely crucial without that monitor i won't really see what i'm doing and in particular when i'm using overlays or anything there is no way for me to know what i'm pointing at but as you can see here that monitor is possibly the part that shows up clearest in the reflection right the neat thing with lcd screens is that there is already a polarizer in front of this so that means that it's going to emit polarized light that polarized light is then reflected and if i now use a circular polarizer here this means that i can cancel just the light from the led screen so that i see the monitor but the monitor does not show up in the recording the price for that is that we just lost half the light so that uh when when you record here you're gonna that's what we need all the light here we need tons of lights so that in the end i think i'm using roughly at what is it iso 640 or something and then a f-stop of 5.9 i think it is you can see that yes f-stop 5.9 and iso 640. that's actually underexposing it a bit uh i'll get to that in a second why uh but uh that's even with all this light i couldn't make do it less and i also i don't want to open the f-stop anymore because i have to open the f-stop more i won't have a very large depth of field and if i don't have any large depth of field i will either have me sharp or the markings i'm writing on the light board sharp so that i need a reasonable depth of field here maybe 5.9 is a bit large but i couldn't make it i couldn't operate the lenses 1.4 or so there are a couple of additional things worth it i i have a an external ssd connected directly to the camera here i'll tell you why in a second the other part that you notice that there's a black backdrop here too the reason for that is that i have windows on the other side and if i don't to cancel out that light that light is going to reflect the receiving reflections in this direction and what i notice is that there is a lamp outside there that lamp is going to shine into the mirror the mirror will then reflect the light on the screen and that light ends up showing the reflection of the lamp outside in the corridor you have no idea how many reflections there are do you see that i had to cover the this is a blank part on the tripod i had to cover that in something back to basically anything that is not black is going to create a reflection so you'd need to look really really carefully in your monitor and make sure you don't have any reflections or you're going to live to regret this i think that's mostly it the tripods and everything they're cheap so it doesn't really matter let's move over to the recording equipment here and show what we're doing so the key piece here is a small recording device also from blackmagic just like the camera there's an atom mining and i use the pro iso version i'll tell you why uh shortly there are a bunch of hdmi connections coming in here first there is a connection coming in from the camera and then there's also a connection coming in from my laptop so i'm presenting on my laptop as if it was an external screen that means that i see the presenter notes and everything on my laptop this small device has a couple of nice functionalities one of them is that if i configure this in the computer it can create an overlay basically the equivalent of a green screen so that anything in my presentation that's black ends up being removed and then that is superimposed on top of the output so if you now see the output out the screen here looks bad if you look at the output in the monitor there do you see that my hands actually go under the protein here because again anything that's black ends up being replaced and i've no idea why the screen here is so dirty i'm gonna need to clean it the monitor i see because that's connected to the output from this eta mining isopro with hdmi the problem with this oh sorry there are two more things i also connect a small ssd device here so that this atom mining that records the iso version here that will record all these streams separately so i'm going to record the stream from my computer i will record the stream from the camera with proper time codes it will also record audio so i have a separate audio link here to a wireless lapel microphone from reddit and this one i'm wearing this um this is a special adapter to it that means that i tape it with surgical tape to my chest or my t-shirt rather and that means that the lapel mic doesn't show up at all it's completely hidden under my shirt that is also recorded separately i can have up to four streams and two microphones in practice i only use two and one microphone what this device also does is that it automatically creates an editable object that i can open directly in davinci resolve which is really nice but the one problem here is that it's only 1080p 2k so how do i get 4k videos well the cool thing here is that the camera itself can output raw data in 6k and that will end up on the ssd connected directly to the camera then i can take those files and just drag them on top of the video project that i have in davinci and because they are time coded just as the output from the a2 mini iso here i can just tell davinci resolve to use video originals or camera originals and that will mean that it will now replace the video part with the 6k resolution so technically the laptop output is still only 1080p i guess i could record that locally in higher resolution if i really wanted to but there is no point so what happens here just to show you an example then i use a marker the white the light board here is a bit of a special device too that i ordered from learning glass europe the white light here is actually completely pointless that they're built-in version of presenter lights it doesn't help at all compared to the much stronger lights but again it doesn't hurt either do you see the blue lights here so this is a piece of roughly 10 millimeter thick uh super clear glass low iron glass that's important because otherwise it would be a bit green the blue leds here they shine into the light from the side and that means that i'm going to get total internal reflection throughout this piece of glass i won't really see the blue light here unless the dirt parts i have but if i now write with a marker here this is a fluorescent marker it's super important that they're fluorescent the normal marker won't work let me show you one just here's a normal marker with a normal marker it will just look like that not visible at all the fluorescent marker when they're hit by this blue light they're gonna obviously gonna create fluorescent light that fluorescent light is then reflected so that i see it into the camera and that's the whole that's the whole way this works there are a couple of different markers i'm not really super happy with any of them basically you have to choose whether you get something that's really visible or something that's easy to erase you can't both have the cake and eat and in practice i'm still struggling with the best way to erase this wet erasing with some sort of window cleaner is better but that quickly gets very ugly and dirty while you're doing the recordings and that's why i'm occasionally a bit lazy thank god as long as you have plenty of light the the part that looks like horrible dirt on the screen here it doesn't show up so much in the total video it's barely noticeable so don't worry too much about it and that's basically it there are unfortunately all this equipment and particularly the mining iso it appears to be a bit buggy or it could be the ssd drives or something and then you keep running out of battery and the wireless microphones and everything so unless you're really careful you do you will end up re-recording some stuff now and then but hey you learn as long as you live