So, now we’re talking about lighting. Lighting is an extremely important determinant of streaming quality. Even a single chip camera can produce great results with excellent lighting. And we talked about the distance from the camera to the subject is also critical because when you zoom in you’re going to lose light to the sensor.
So this is a picture of that same project Ronnie was talking about. You can see here that this fellow’s on the large screen. It’s a photo, but you can see there’s plenty of good broadcast lighting in the front of the stage. So if you look at what we designed here, the stage area down in front of the steps, that’s all nice, broadcast quality, even colored temperature lighting. Behind that you see all the blues and the accent lighting, it’s two different types and two different processes. One, is for a look, a mood, a feel, a light and set in scenery behind. That could be blue, it could be green tomorrow, it could be half green, half blue, but the light where the pastor and the people are going to stand is good, broadcast lighting.
Now that’s going to basically mean that we want to have what we call three point lighting. Anybody ever heard of that before? Okay, a couple people. So what we want to do is we want to have our nice front key lighting and if you put the light too high, again all of these things are specific determinants, if a light’s too high and it’s shining down on me like this, what’s going to happen to my eyes? I’m going to have shadows, I’m going to look like Mr. Raccoon, right? And some pastors have deep brows and in the mix it’s really bad when that happens. So having the light at the proper angle is going to help get that front lighting.
If all I have is front lighting and I don’t have any top or side lighting, I’m going to look like a two dimensional cartoon character when you put me on TV. So I want to have some lighting that lights behind me and on top of me so that I have depth. So that when you see it on camera, it looks like a three dimensional image. If you don’t do that then you’re just going to have a floating head type of a look with that guy standing in front of it.
And here in this application here, one of the things that you have to determine when you’re talking with your consultant about this is where is the pastor actually going to go? How many of you guys, first of all, I’m talking to pastors, how many guys here are not from churches? One, okay. Two, okay. So I’m going to use the church terminology and the church as an example because most of you guys are from church.
So we’re talking to the consultant and we’re saying okay, we want to do video streaming, the church board tells you this or your company board says we want to be able to do this. What do we need to worry about lighting wise? Well, where is the pastor going to go? That’s a question that most people forget. They think, well pastor’s going to stay right here. Well, maybe that pastor is, but what about the guy that comes in next week? Maybe he’s the guy who wants to come over here, right? We’ve had pastors that want to get all the way out here. Hey brother, how you doing? Let’s talk about this. And they wonder why we’re watching online he just disappeared. They see some fuzzy thing moving around out there and they lost the guy. It’s because he doesn’t have proper lighting where he wants to go.
We’ve done a couple churches where we had to actually light the first third of the congregation because the pastor on any given second might run down there and start talking to people. And guess what? That’s part of understanding what your particular application is. That’s why we can’t say well, you just do this and this. Everybody’s got a different application. Sometimes if the pastor just stands there, guess what, that’s easy to light. I got one area. But what if the pastor comes over here? Now is he too hot, what if he walks over here? You know, understanding that particular positioning is really critical to getting good lighting. Make sense to everybody? Pretty straightforward, right?
Now what you’re talking about behind the guy, we call that eye candy. From the camera, I don’t really care about that except it’s in the backdrop of my shot. Right? That’s creating a thematic element behind the pastor, being able to change those backdrops. Sometimes we’ll do what we call environmental projection. We’ll project on the wall or the whole stage behind the pastor with projected images. Now you can create whatever look and feel you want in the camera shot. So if you wanted to have a backdrop where the pastor was standing there and you had the walls of Jericho or a desert or a river or a cloud’s flying by with doves because he’s talking about the Spirit. Guess what? Hit the button and it’s behind the pastor.
So doing something like that gives you a lot of creative flexibility with what’s in the backdrop of the pastor. Because if you don’t think about not only the front which is my lighting, but what’s in the back of the shot, then you’ve limited yourself to half of what you can do creatively. Does that make sense? And some people put LED walls behind the pastor, that’s pretty cool too. Some of them are really bright. That causes other issues because when that wall is behind the pastor if it’s close to him, now you got an issue with your camera because you’ve got so much light coming behind him that it overwhelms the light coming from the front so that has to be taken into consideration also.
So, here’s the last part of it that we talk about. Utilize interesting shot composition, okay? No matter how good your image quality is, a single talking head or a single wide shot gets boring very quickly. Use multiple cameras, angles, fields of view to keep the viewer engaged.
I can not tell you how many times that I have seen somebody that wants to go streaming and they buy one camera and they get one fixed shot and that’s what they put on the internet for an hour. Now if you can sit there and watch that for an hour I’m going to give you five bucks because I sure can’t do it.
The other thing we see is, they’ll do one robotic camera because you can move that things around. Now that’s the way to do it, save some money there. And this is what it looks like to you when you’re watching online. Pastor’s preaching and then sister Sarah’s going to play the organ, there’s the shot. And then she’s done playing the organ it’s going to go back to pastor. Back to the pastor. And they do that for an hour. And if you aint seasick after watching that for an hour, you must have took Dramamine before he put the show on.
So have an interesting shot composition is part of the creative process. Understanding how do we want to take and communicate this event to the worldwide web, how do we want to communicate to people at home, understanding and having that concept of making it interesting, right? Making it engaging. We’re not entertaining people, but watching the static camera shot is really boring. Maybe we fade in, maybe we fade out, maybe we take a different angle, that keeps people’s interest. Putting a graphic up on the screen, that helps. But you’ve all seen that, right? How many people have seen what I’m talking about? They got one guy standing up there or they got a wide shot and the pastors that dude that’s about that tall on the stage, and the audio’s like, is he in a rap band or a heavy metal band or, they didn’t get the audio right.
So my point is all of these components, if you don’t capture the image and get a good quality start, don’t do it because you’re just going to embarrass yourself. So one of the things we hear a lot in churches is we don’t have enough volunteers, that’s a really common, not only with churches, but in schools, getting people to actually run all the gear.
So, what is happening now is that robotic camera is running off of a tracking software that follows me around which is probably one of the things that gets more churches excited than anything else that we talk about because you mean I don’t have to do anything, it just follows you? Well guess what, nobody’s touching it and it’s following me. Now the key operative word here is it’s following me. Everybody get that? So I’m going to walk over here, see how it’s following me?
Now the thing is, a robotic camera will never do what a manned camera can do, alright? A manned camera guy can see with his eye that you’re moving and instinctively lead you with the camera, he’ll do it automatically and instinctively because your brain tells you he’s moving that way, I need to lead him that way. The robotic camera will follow me. So, as I’m walking do you see the camera’s kind of following behind me. You see it? But guess what, if you want to take that shot and you want to have a shot where the pastor is in the frame and you don’t have to have some guy that’s falling asleep, that’s a great tool. But know the difference that this is going to follow me not lead me like a manned operator would do.
Now what it’s done is the camera has done a actual wire frame picture of me and it stored it in the computer and the software is picking me out off the background when I move around that software is following where I go because it’s already captured me in it’s memory bank. You can have multiple speakers and multiple pastors, different shapes and sizes of people, different zooms and the software will remember what you set up. So if you want to do a tight shot of just this face shape, or a wide shot of my body shape, you can program any of those multiple shots into that software and it will remember those.
A robotic camera still can not do what a good manned operator can do and I don’t think it ever will because the manned operator can see what’s going on, he can anticipate what’s going to happen and all the robotic camera can do is react. Albeit, it followed me pretty well, but it’s still going to always be reacting. Did I answer the question? So you gotta find the shot that you want. That could be a great fixed follow shot for out here that you can always fall back to. So if you’ve got a tight shot and pastor all the sudden jumps out of frame, you can fade into that shot. It will sort of salvage it, sort of.