tutorials, files & more from Gracepoint Ministries

Videos

Shooting Video on the Canon 7D

Recently, our church purchased a sweet Canon EOS 7D for the express purpose of shooting video.  It’s an awesome camera, but most of us didn’t know how to use it.  After spending a few months with this camera, I decided to record this tutorial on using the 7D to shoot video.  Though having photography fundamentals is really useful, the tutorial just assumes you’ve shot on a consumer DV camera in the past and introduces the basics and not-so basics of the 7D — all from the perspective of shooting video.

Now, this video is really, really rough.  I threw my own personal 7D on a tripod and hit record.  My son was just born when I made this recording so I know I look like a zombie in this footage.  Focus on the camera, not me ;)

Tutorial Chapters:

  1. Introduction (11 min)
  2. Lens Overview (19 min)
  3. More Lenses (14 min)
  4. Camera / ISO / Exposure (15 min)
  5. Exposure Triangle (20 min)
  6. White Balance (8 min)
  7. Presets (7 min)
  8. Production Techniques (12 min)
  9. More Production Techniques (8 min)

Tutorial Notes (PDF, 2MB)

You can also watch see the entire tutorial as a playlist album.

Jun 03, 2010 | Categories: Videos | 1 Comment »

Filming Basics

This is a link to Conrad’s blog on filming for last year’s MYT.  He covered camera basics, camera setup, coverage, lighting, production techniques, and story boarding.

http://myt2009film.wordpress.com/

May 27, 2010 | Categories: Videos | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Using Skype with DV cameras for JCC and GLIVE

Many of us know Skype as the software product that allows us to do a phone conversation or a chat (video or audio) session with our friends and in particular with friends abroad – all via the internet. When my friend George was overseas we used Skype for a video conference with him and some of our friends.

Most recently, we’ve taken Skype to a new level – when we broadcasted JCC and then GLIVE. We’ve even “skyped” people for meetings and such as well.  So let me explain some basics here.  This is delving a little into the video world but you need to understand both to see how this works.
Here’s the flow:
Mixer Board (xlr) –> DV Video Camera (dv) –> Video Switcher (dv) –> dv repeater (dv into computer and dv deck*) –> Computer with Skype (audio input from Dv Deck) –> Recipient Computer with Skype
Flow for this setup is relatively simple.  But this is a much larger setup. We use the video switcher b/c we have multiple cameras and inputs coming into the switcher.  Usually we have 3 cameras and an S-Video (pro-presenter/slides).
For a single camera setup, it’s similar:
Mixer Board (xlr) –> DV Video Camera (dv) –> dv repeater (dv into computer and DV deck*) –> Computer with Skype (audio input from Dv Deck) –> Recipient Computer with Skype
* the reason that we need the dv repeater and the deck is b/c Skype cannot handle the video and audio stream in the dv input.  i don’t know why but it will not accept the audio input, so we need to grab the audio from another dv device, hence the repeater. I’m sure i’ve confused a few of you by this point.  that’s b/c it is confusing.  hopefully skype will resolve this issue and then we could just plug the dv camera right into the laptop and we’ll be good.
So this is a rough presentation.  If you have more questions i can try to fill in the gaps.

Jan 11, 2010 | Categories: Videos | Tags: , | Leave A Comment »

Blue Flame Pro

Blue Flame Pro is a Bidirectional Media Converter that we use on Sunday’s for our overflow setup.

Here are setup steps:
1. Connect output A YC (s-video) via s-video cable to projector
2. Connect output A CH1 and CH2 via XLRs to snake
3. Connect DV I/O via firewire cable to DVoverIP laptop

Once all the devices are powered on,
1. Turn on power of Blue Flame.
2. Turn on codec by clicking “ON POWER” button.
3. Start digital to analog decoding by clicking “DV DECODE” button.

Other things to know:
* Press the DV Decode Selector to do a RESET.
* Main Power Switch: Should the unit be powered off, allow 10 seconds for system reset before turning on power again.

Jan 11, 2010 | Categories: Videos | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

Pro Video Presenter

Remember how we played all those videos at NSWN and SWS at Pauley – on the center screen and side screens. Well, there was a little piece of cool software behind it all.

Thanks to Brad and the others at Renewed Vision for their help in getting us a trial license to test out their application in a real production setting. I have to say that everything worked out very, very nicely. We had a few snags but we worked through them. Our biggest complication was using PVP with ProP.

Here’s how we did our setup:

* Although this was against best practices we did use the primary machine and the slave over a private wifi network.
* The primary was a MBP outputting to two projectors via a dual head matrox external video device powered by USB. This gave us a resolution of 2048×768.
* The slave machine was a MBP outputting to 2 side projectors via a kramer pict tools 1 –> 4 duper. Basically the same image to both projectors.
* Imbetween we used a Kramer scaler vp710 and Corio scaler to manage the middle projector and side projectors.
* I can give more details if you’d like. Some of it is documented on the previous posts.
A VERY NICE about the PVP software is that it’ll playback the video in the resolution that the machine it’s on is playing. So the primary could output to 2048×768 and the sides could do 1024×768. We didn’t even take advantage of the tiling…partially b/c of license constraints.
We’re in the process of evaluating the software and will determine shortly how we can integrate this into our present environment at Willard Auditorium.

Jan 10, 2010 | Categories: Videos | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Video Recording Directly to Computer

We video record some of our skits, messages, talks, etc.. for archiving purposes as well as for future training. The standard procedure for us has been:

1. record event to DV tape
2. capture/digitize DV tape with Final Cut Pro in real time.
3. edit and export FCP project into a smaller/portable format – like h.264
I’ve tried a new method recently.
1. record event to DV tape AND directly capture/encode with Quicktime Broadcaster.
* this way we have a backup of the event on tape and we have an already captured and compressed digital version.
* i haven’t tried doing this with regular Quicktime and especially the new version of Quicktime with Snow Leopard which i hope to test soon.
I’m attaching some screenshots to help you to know what settings you should use. Main thing to note is that the resolution is small, the data rate is lower and audio quality is lower. This is a good and fast way to make video files available for others. It’s not the highest quality but this is very, very fast and speeds up the whole process. I think we save around 3 hours that would normally go into setting up the capture station, capturing and then exporting. Below are some screen shots of the settings I use. For better audio quality you can do stereo instead of mono.
AUDIO SETTINGS
VIDEO SETTINGS

Jan 04, 2010 | Categories: Videos | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

Small Groups Video

Gracepoint is giving away our Small Group video for free to any church. From the get-go, we wanted a small group video that anyone could use, and would work with a variety of target audiences with nothing really specific to Gracepoint. I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor and find a use for it in your ministry. It was quite a fun experience. Enjoy!

Background

As part of a recent effort to advertise our small group ministries, a bunch of us created a small promo video that was largely inspired by a video on Skechtravel. After some experimentation, we ended up using After Effects to create the animation behind it. Richard, a talented graphic designer (and the man behind our awesome stage designs), created the assets in Illustrator. The animation was keyframed in After Effects and was a mix of 2D and 3D cameras. Music, sound effects, and foley work was created and mastered in Apple Soundtrack Pro. Final output was done in Final Cut Pro 6.

After Effects vs Motion

The decision to use After Effects was a difficult one. We initially wanted to use the recently released Motion 3 after attending a session of the Apple Final Studio 2 Tour. The 3D camera in Motion was incredible. In the past, I had a lot of problems with After Effects’ 3D environment because I often lost my feel of where I was in 3D (being more accustomed to packages like Maya and Softimage). Apple’s 3D environment in Motion was refreshing. However, one key feature was missing. We could not easily import Illustrator paths into Motion, and there were no tools to morph paths. So it seemed After Effects still had a leg up when it came to mask manipulation (due to the big emphasis on rotowork in the last two releases).

Finally, given our deadline (1.5 weeks), I went with a solution that I knew would work. We did the entire video as a single composition (and pre-comps) in After Effects. Given how there were continuous transitions in the video from one scene to another, there was really no way to render out clips that could be edited together in FCP. Unfortunately, we had to time all the animation to audio inside After Effects which was painful since AE isn’t really designed to scrub audio very well.

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May 16, 2009 | Categories: Videos | Leave A Comment »