I Will Love You If You Let Me (Live In Studio 3 Camera Test)

Doing all your own media provides a rich and varying set of challenges to keep up with the rich hipsters and the media mega-conglomerates they patronize. I am of the opinion that one static camera filming me playing a song is about as boring as watching Democrats tell Dick Cheney jokes, but this is the internet, and unless there's a flashy video, no one will care about the underlying product. So this is Test #1 of a multicam in-studio shoot. The camera on my head is a Canon Vixia HV30 1080i MiniDV camera. The wide shot is an iPhone 4 shooting 720p. The guitar camera is an iPhone 4S shooting 1080i. The final video was rendered at 720p. Other than ending up picking pretty crappy angles for the iPhones, my biggest problem with how this came out is the iPhone's insistence on automatically setting the exposure too high, which creates a lot of noise in the darker background areas. It's good when the photographer is a soccer mom trying to brag about her life on Facebook, or a hipster who's going to make it look like it was shot on a Polaroid 600, but not for someone who needs six Red Ones but can't afford dinner tomorrow night.

Also, an oversight on my part: The guitar camera decided to focus on my mic stand instead of the guitar. Shame, too, when you can get nice bokeh out of a camera this small, it shouldn't go to waste. We'll get it next time.

I'm looking into apps now that will shoot video but let me set the exposure manually, so I can over-light the subject to get more performance out of the cameras.

As nice as it is to be able to do this, it's highly impractical. 720p video shot on the iPhone 4 is about 100MB/min, and 1080p video shot on the iPhone 4S is about 200MB/min. And both phones are 16GB models. So, it's definitely one of those things where you unsync all the music off the phones, shoot one or two songs, connect both phones to iPhoto and "import" the videos, drag them out of iPhoto, send them to iPhoto trash, empty iPhoto trash, and sync all the music back on when you're done. Impractical, yes, but possible, and it's about time it was at least that.

Since this is a test, you just get me, unshaved and unkempt, hell, there isn't even any auto-tune or anything. Enjoy. Or scream in pain as my cracking, ever-pubescent voice tears at your bleeding eardrums.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Camera
• Canon
• Video
• Test
• Multicam
• Mark Scudder
• I Will Love You If You Let Me
• Singer/Songwriter
• live
• in-studio
• live in-studio
• live music
• acoustic