The other day I was asked to film some video blog entries for a company. They had been filming the blog in-house and needed someone to fill in. Thus causing me to recreate their setup but allowing me the opportunity to improve their existing schemes.

I immediately noticed some challenges given that we were filming on a DSLR. They had been filming with the stock firmware instead of using the Magic Lantern firmware upgrade. They also ran a wireless mic straight into the camera. While this is not a bad idea it doesn’t allow for great control over the volume levels and it also doesn’t turn the AGC (automatic gain control) off inside the camera. So when the person was quiet the camera boosted the gain and added more room noise which can easily be taken out in post. The biggest problem was that whenever the talent started talking the automatic gain was up so high that it caused the audio to peak and sound distorted. I fixed this by first running the audio into a Tascam audio recorder and adjusting the input levels which I could not see onscreen thanks to Magic Lantern. I also set the levels of the line out going straight to the camera. This meant that I had a perfectly usable scratch track sent to the camera and a backup/better version on the external recorder (depending on what workflow you wanted to use).

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I was also able to make some lighting adjustments to their setup. The company was shooting with a very flat look. They used 2 KinoFlo Diva lights on each side of the talent’s face. I instead used one Diva for the talent and the other Diva for general ambient lighting in the room. I added a 300W hair light to the talent’s hair and shoulders to help separate them from the background. I also used some duvateen cloth to black out the window on the side of the room. The window shade was giving off a weird green color cast which looked very unappealing on the talent’s skin and face. It also allowed me to control the contrast more accurately on the talent’s face. I brought a negative fill (black foam core) in case I wanted to add more contrast but I felt that this was the right look for the company’s message.