QUESTION ANSWERED: DVL

I recently got an email concerning the DVL Project. I thought it might be interesting to post an excerpt of the email and my reply.

"So, I noticed you said you film your interviews yourself. I'm actually planning a 'similar' project.

So since I'll be more or less filming and editing the interviews myself (even though as of right now i have NO idea how to edit) I was wondering if you could offer me a little guidance!

1. What lighting did you use for your interviews?
2. how many cameras did you use?
3. How'd you capture the audio?
4. I know this one may not make much sense, but, how hard is it to edit these interviews? The style you use is EXACTLY what I want mine to look like."

Click the link, to read my reply...

And here the excerpt of my reply:

"Ok let me start with answering your questions point by point:

1) I am using a three point lighting set. Actually those lights are the modeling lights on my three Bowens studio flashes. I "misuse" those flashes as studio video lights, because they give me the ability to use the bowens lightmodifiers like the bowens Beauty Dish or softboxes. To be exact I use the Beauty Dish as a main light with a fill card just below the interviewee, a strip light as a rimlight and the third light is for the background.

2) I use two cameras. I own the Nikon D5000 and the second camera is just any camera I can borrow at the moment. For the last six interviews I had a Panasonic HD Handy Cam available. For the next interviews I will borrow a Canon 550d. One reason for using two cameras was of course being able to edit, but another reason was the limited recordingtimes of the DSLR cameras. The Nikon only allows a recording time of 5 minutes and the Canon will give you 12 minutes. So you need to look out when one camera runs out, so that you don't end up with a part where no camera is rolling.

3) I capture the audio seperately with the M-Audio Microtrack 2 and a Sennheiser Shotgun Mic that a friend kindly borrowed me. The M-Audio isn't certainly the best, but it was the most affordable without sacrificing to much usability. I sync audio and both cameras in the editing programm.

4) Well, the question itself is unfortunately hard to answer. Editing is my job, and of course it became a second nature of me, but I wouldn't dare to say that editing is easy because there is always a lot to learn and a lot you can do wrong. Especially with interviews it can be quite difficult, because you are actually editing the words and emotions of someone else. Ok, I just realized that that wasn't exactly your question. Technically speaking: Getting the material into the editing programm, editing and then output to web became quite easy nowadays, but there are a lot of things you can get wrong.

Sorry the last answer probably didn't help you that much, but I will try to answer your future question as good as possible ;-)

Greets from Germany.
Bo"