I don't recall how much of this I might have mentioned before but a
friend (who teaches classes on iThings) asked if I could shoot a 10
minute demonstration video of him teaching an iThingy class (along with
students). Fortunately, I have free access to the development's
clubhouse which has some very large rooms for various functions.
Where I planned to shoot this turned out to be a bad choice. He uses a
TV set to project his presentation "slides". The room is lit mostly by
some sort of strange incandescent bulbs (good color at 3K) but the TV
set is balanced for daylight. Shooting the TV in that room at 3K color
balance gave some garish results on the TV.
So I had to change rooms to one that had a large TV on the wall and a
lot of glass. It is well lit by natural sunlight. It is also shaped
such that I could put both the E-M1 and E-M5 back-to-back on separate
tripods and use one to video the instructor and the other to video the
students. Then all I have to do is edit the 2 videos into on that
switches from instructor to students and back again when a student asks
a question. Cameras unattended except to start them rolling.
Today was a practice session to decide on lenses for each camera, angle
of coverage and distance for the student seating and, especially, how
big is the file for a 10 or 20 minute video and can a single battery
handle that that much time while working video the entire time.
So here are a couple of numbers that Oly doesn't give you. I had set
both cameras to use "HD Normal" which is the smallest MPEG-4 image size
of the 4 available... 1280x720 at lowest (normal) resolution. I ran
both cameras for about 13-1/2 minutes. One camera produced a file a bit
more than 1GB, the other produced a file a bit less than 1GB. The
larger file had more motion in it (the instructor walking around and
gesturing) the other had no real students in attendance, just me
occupying one of 15 chairs and moving around occasionally to different
chairs. I think 15 real (moving) students will make the file grow larger.
Anyhow, I consider the test a success. The maximum file size is 2GB so
it would probably take 20-25 minutes to reach that which is more than
enough time for the completed video. I was also concerned about battery
life doing video but the battery gauges show no apparent drop in level
after 13-1/2 minutes. I don't know how long they'll actually last but
I'm certain it is long enough.
Success... so far. Next I have to actually shoot the real video this
coming Friday and then figure out how to edit them into a coherent,
single file.
ps: Windows Movie Maker (which seems a fine, simple editor) as delivered
in Win 7 knows nothing about MPEG-4 (.MOV) produced by the camera.
MPEG-4 is a container file for MOV format which is an Apple invention.
But fear not, a codec for MPEG-4 and Windows Movie Maker is available on
the web... just not from Microsoft.
See, now we're all video guys. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
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