I see you’ve gone metal; interesting. Your love ballads still stir in me and I came looking to hear them again. I am still recording my 1st album in between debilitating, morbid headaches. I’m hoping to have a disc late 2012.

Of course the majority of your work is pleasing to the ear but, “Mother” and “In Love With You” and “Wasted” are truly your calling.

I thought I would already be at the point in time to request permission rights to record a couple of your songs, but I am bogged down and in a funk I’ve never experienced before.

I was overjoyed to run into this site that had the mother and love with you downloads. I just NEEDED to hear them again. It’s really great music Kevin. Understand, we are not in the same league as most of the so-called music out there and if nobody has told you that you certainly need to hear it. You’re a good songwriter so you certainly don’t need me blowing sunshine up your ass. And I adore your love ballads have the ability to rip out one’s heart and throw it across the street.

Perfect.

Keep in touch.

HappyHarryNET

I was wondering if you use a control surface in Pro Tools.

Best

Chris Billias

Best

Chris Billias

I especially would like to thank you for helping me truly understand compression through your song. I was finally able to take a nice, clean vocal and use compression to even it out and make it sound very natural! Thank you so much for helping me understand the intricate details of threshold, ratio, attack, and release.

Best of luck, Yosef.

I love your tribute recording! Such a clean arrangement and performances, and of course your voice is luscious and strong, as always!

In case you’re wondering what the difference is, with the digital zoom the devices internal computer is zooming in on a part of the image it is capturing. Essentially enlarging the pixels of one area of the image, which will then give you a blurry and/or pixelated image.

An optical zoom is a regular zoom lens. It means the lens itself is moving internally and zooming, causing a magnification of whatever you’re looking at, still giving you a clear image.

Rob Lavender here. I will keep my answers as to the point as possible and aimed at the common uses for those in the music industry.

Question:

1. Is a wide angle shot simply a zoomed out shot? Is it really at an angle at all? If so, then what is a zoomed out shot that is dead straight on?

Answer: While there are many explanations and uses for wide angle, there are two main descriptions of a wide angle shot. The first applies to simply seeing more in the picture of a given scene. Imagine a close up shot of two people talking to each other. You can hear them speaking but also hear extraneous noises, some clanking and clattering a repeating clink but you can’t see what is causing the noises as the camera is close up and you only see two people’s head and shoulders. The next shot is the same two people talking but the camera is now at wide angle, and you can see that they are on a subway train and the noises are now explained.

This is a common use for wide angle, and it allows the story teller to show you what is important, set a scene and then explain the context and to do so without using dialog to explain it. The dialog can have nothing to do with the scene and yet the scene can still be explained.

We often see this as a zoomed in shot and then a zoomed out shot.

The other description is technically more accurate as it is including more area in the picture without changing distance. In this instance the people in our scene would still be the same apparent size and closeness but we can see more of the surroundings in the scene. This type of wide angle shot can only be achieved with a wide angle lens, and not by zooming in or out with a standard lens.

I see in another answer posted to you where someone said that a zoom lens is only found on a consumer camera, and that is just not true and especially not true in video. He is correct that when using a 35 mm or 70 mm movie film camera that zoom lenses are a very rare thing indeed; however almost every video lens is a zoom lens. I know you can’t see it, but ask anyone watching a sports game. Or local and network news, the cameras used are professional cameras and lenses and every dang one of them can zoom in and out.

That said; the actual act of zooming or seeing the picture while in transition is not used all that much as it can tend to be disorienting. So shots are most often used after the camera adjustments have been made. Not always mind you, there are times that the zoom is used to help tell the story and most often it is the zoom out from close to wide. That is done to show context.

Now to get real specific. Let’s say you are making a video showing how you use Pro-Tools. Chances are you will be in a small room. For most cameras this is a tough thing as the camera can’t get far enough back to include much of the room or the people and equipment in it. With a standard lens the camera would have to move around a lot to show what is going on. If you use a wide angle lens, then you can get more of the room, people and gear into the shot and so not so much moving the camera around.

When shooting in such a space I always use a wide angle lens in order to get more area into the shot. However care must be taken with the choice of wide angle lenses as many will give a distorted view specifically a fishbowl effect. Some can also cause vignetting, which is a darkened area around the edges of the picture. I have found that Raynox makes the best wide angle lenses for smaller video cameras.

I use a Raynox HD 6600 Pro with my Canon video camera when shooting close up at concerts. In fact I used one for that video I did of you at Montrose, Colorado. That was a two camera shoot. One camera with standard zoom lens was placed at the front of house position; I used another camera with a wide angle lens, on a steady-cam rig for the close up work. By using a wide angle lens I could get closer to your face and still see the keyboard.

Question 2 revolves around the web-cam in a mac laptop and I have no experience with those.

Questions 3 is about the GoPro camera. This is a very well made P.O.V. (point of view) It is not intended to a primary camera, think of it more a B-roll camera. The prime intention with the design of the GoPro was to be able to capture sports from the participants point of view. Naturally people have found many other good uses for this camera.

The fact that many different types of mounts and mounting hardware is made for the GoPro make this little camera very versatile. But it should not be mistaken for a primary camera. It is not.

This would be very good for the walk around type videos that you spoke of.
For a general all purpose video camera, I would look at the offerings from SONY and Canon, perhaps JVC and Panasonic. I would think that for your purposes I would want a HD camcorder that records to SD cards. That would make transfer to a computer based editing system much easier and faster than even transferring from a hard drive based camera, let alone a tape base or DVD based camcorder.

Question 4. What’s a better situation: mounting a camera like the one mentioned above on a tripod, or using the macbook camera to capture a basic video of me playing. If on a tripod, what should the height be on average? How far away should I be from it?
Answer: You could do something like that Kevin the trick would be trying to keep the macbook out of the field of view of the tripod mounted camera, or at least in a place where it is not distracting from the other video.

You can also simulate a 3 or more camera shoot. This works well for video of someone playing an instrument and singing. Simulating a multiple camera shoot involves placing the camera in one position and shooting the entire song. Then you move the camera to a new position and shoot the entire song again. You repeat this process for however many different angles you want in the final product. This is how most music videos are made. Of course in a music video the artist or band is simply playing and singing along with the recording of the song. When edited together it looks as if there were multiple cameras used. This same method works well for instructional videos too, where the different camera angles can be used to highlight specific points or to break up the monotony of a tripod shot of someone talking.

Now, I will note here that the trick to this working when the artist or band is playing the song live is that the timing and tempo needs to be the same for all takes. So a click track is needed, but of course you don’t want to hear the click track on the video. If you are working with a sequencer for drum parts then you have no problems.

Question 5. What about lighting? Now I know that we could go for days on concepts like white balance and such, but give me the basic idea. What must be present in a room as far as light goes for objects to be clearly seen. What about outside? I know that the glare from the sun can blow out an image, rendering it completely unviewable. Is that correct?

Answer: Video cameras work best with plenty of light and especially of that light is the same color temperature of daylight. Thankfully there are now some very nice inexpensive CFL that are daylight equivalent color temperature. I use them often as the amperage draw is so low compared to regular video lights, also they are not nearly as hot, in fact they stay rather cool, and so the room doesn’t heat up as badly either.

I get mine from Cowboy Studio in Allen, TX. Here is a link the bulb page on their web site: http://www.cowboystudio.com/product/c06/c0601.php

I use the long folded type 85 watts (equals a 300 watt incandescent light bulb) with a photographers reflector set up about 10” to 12” behind it to light up an entire room or area. Sometimes it is necessary to use 2 of them depending on the size of the area I need to light. I use the smaller 30 watt daylight CFL’s with a clip on reflector available at most hardware stores to create a fill light.

A little ingenuity and guy can put together a good basic video lighting system very inexpensively.

He sun used to be a real problem for video cameras back when they used tubes. I had to learn this costly mistake for myself back in my early days of video using a SONY M3 three tube camera with a ¾” portable video tape recorder. Shooting some beach scenes and got burn spots on the tubes. They show up as white glare spots that don’t go away. You have to replace the tubes… ouch.

With the new CMOS and even CCD chips this is not nearly as much of an issue. First off the camera in auto Iris mode will shut down much of the suns brilliance, but more importantly is that the chips are not as susceptible to injury as were tubes.

So while I wouldn’t shoot video of the sun without proper filtering the occasionally glare from the sun is not going to cause any real problems. In fact sometimes the white bloom of sun glare is used to transition from one scene to another,

I hope this was helpful. If you need any other advice or have any questions feel free to call on me any time.

Rob Lavender