recommendations for making video of your show?

[winwin]

Like probably all of us, I'd like to make a video of my display. I wonder what kind of settings to use and recommendations you may have to optimize quality without using any kind of fancy/professional camera.

[rrowan]

I always video my show (using a point & shoot camera) before it gets dark. Our eyes are better at seeing in the dark than any camera. So to get an idea when, stand outside with sunglasses on and when it starts to get dark then try videoing. Try multi times to figure out your best video time (note: time of day for any future videoing)

Some pointers:
1 - Use a tripod (or sit camera on something solid - ladder, table, trash can, etc)
2 - turn off auto focus and use manual focus if possible
3 - set white balance (use incandescent or fluorescent ) depending on your type of lights
4 - turn on wind noise reduction (usually in video/movie setting)
5 - if using #1 then turn off any vibration reduction

Hope that helps some

Rick R.

[Steve Gase]

• have a radio playing the music in your sequence audible
• with video editing software, replace the audio track with your original audio file -- use the recorded radio to help synchronize the replacement track
• film at dusk to prevent the bright lights from overwhelming the camera and causing blur and washout

[dkulp]

You can do what I did for Halloween (and may for Christmas videos):   hack the FPP source code to apply a dimming curve to whole ranges of channels (mega-tree, other super bright LED things, etc...) to reduce the brightness to levels the camera can tollerate, use the hacked FPP to run things while recording, then restore back.

OK... may be a bit difficult for non-developers.    :-)

[winwin]

Thanks for the responses, it does help more than some.
I was not thinking of editing the video but now that you mention it, it probably would be a good enhancement to the quality of the sound. Any suggestions what to use?
I'll pass on dkulp' suggestion, too simple to implement!

[Steve Gase]

I use the free, and fairly powerful Windows Movie Maker... its downloadable for free from the Microsoft site.


Regarding dkulp's suggestion... last year I wrote a perl script, available on the Falcon site, to reduce the intensity for a range of channels.  you could say  "reduce 3000-5000 to 50%" ...    I created this script to address my problems with Techicolor strings last year (which wasn't enough to solve those issues!) The script was created before enhancements were made to Nutcracker to reduce intensity of objects.  Search for [/size]SeqXlater-xseq.pl