All about setting up an audio/visual recording of a performance where to my surprise… I would be one of the performers. I learned a lot about microphones, cameras, lighting and general things to look out for if I ever wanted to do a recording myself. There are condenser microphones that are awesome as they will pick up every nuance of a performance, their only downside is that they will pick up every nuance of a performance 🙂 so that means they can easily pick up environmental sounds like air conditioners and other performers which may over power your desired sound. Dynamic microphones are not susceptible to external sounds so are good for the stage but offer inferior sound quality compared to a condenser microphone. We learned some camera basics, like how to set them up, hold them and the importance of camera ‘composition’; you generally have a ‘fixed’ camera that captures all the action and other cameras to zoom in and out. When thinking about composition (in the sense of capturing people’s faces), you must know how far away you are from them, the direction they are facing, the ‘story’ you are trying to tell. With lighting I learned that you could put filters over lights to reduce shadows and that top to bottom fluorescent lighting without external sunlight is the worst lighting you could get; this is due to the shading it creates on people’s faces especially around the eyes. A victim of poor lighting can be seen below.
I shared this action shot below in a music education Facebook group.
JohnMuTech 