There’s been a lot of talk lately about video in e-Learning, but not much about what hardware you’ll need and what’s best optimized for e-Learning. What hardware do you need? What amounts to overkill or underkill? Why is video in e-Learning any different than any other video?
I’ll start with the last question first.
Vive la différence!
So why is video in e-Learning different from other video? There are three reasons.
First, the end product will probably be delivered with bandwidth that’s sub-optimal, or just OK at best, and under a very constrained network environment. The IT department needs to lock down networks to prevent intrusion, and this constrains the environment. Without locking things down, your network would be a sitting target for anyone who wanted to wreak havoc on your company. Now, locked down environments are fine for sharing or fetching documents or PowerPoint presentations internally, but a highly “Flashed” presentation that’s coming from a SCORM-compliant server, or any server within the intranet network is going to be difficult to get to the desktop.
Second, the HD (High Definition) myth is not going to go away soon, but the bandwidth of most corporate environments can’t play back HD video without hiccups. You’ll also get your IT department very angry with you for putting HD video on their servers, especially because you can’t show it at HD resolutions.
Third, most of us don’t have the time or money to spend on high-end equipment, so we’ve got to be smart and frugal and spend where it will show up on the screen.
What hardware do you need?
Here’s a short list of the equipment needed for video production. This covers video in a studio or in the field, and indoors or out. I’ll go over the items one by one.
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Tripod
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Lights and reflectors
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Microphone(s)
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Computer
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Camera
I’ll leave the camera for last, since that may be a little controversial.
Tripod
Even though today’s “edgy” video is usually handheld (and wasn’t that all the rage in the 1950s when they called it cinema vérité), you still need a platform to put your camera on, even if it’s just for keeping it handy and not putting it on the ground. You can purchase a decent tripod and tripod head (they usually come as separate pieces) for about $200 to $250. There are a lot of brands out there, mostly manufactured by just a few companies, but they all have different features – how the legs lock, how low and how high they go, etc. My favorite brand right now is Manfrotto. I just like the way the tripod works. But that’s me. You should look around.
As for a tripod head, get a fluid head. A fluid head allows smooth tilts (moving the camera up and down on the axis of the camera) and pans (moving the camera left and right along the axis of the camera). This is really the only choice for video work, where you will be zooming, tilting, and panning. Another, cheaper type of head, called a friction head, works just as it sounds by applying friction on a surface to make resistance, thereby smoothing out the motions of the camera. Friction heads aren’t for video though. When you make your budget for video equipment, anything over $200 should get you a decent tripod and head set-up.
If you need a tripod that can get into crazy places then get the weight-appropriate Joby Gorillapod or something similar. These flexible tripods can conform to almost any surface, giving you camera angles that you can only imagine.
Lights and reflectors
Even if you plan to shoot outside, you’ll still need lights. You have several light source options ranging from the bottom to the top of the price scale.
Incandescent — This is the least expensive type of light you can get; it will fit in almost anyone’s budget. The light is soft, which is a good thing for video, and it has pleasing warmth. The advantages of incandescent lights are price and performance. Incandescent bulbs are inexpensive, last a good long while, and don’t get extremely hot. Disadvantages are that these lights tend to get warmer in tone over time (you can always do a white balance so the video doesn’t get too red), and the reflectors are difficult to position precisely. I don’t think these disadvantages matter much.
Halogen — This is the most common type of studio lighting today. Halogen lights still have a filament and are technically incandescent, but they are slightly cooler in color temperature and run much hotter. They are also much more expensive, but at the same time, they direct the light more. The light is not as soft as the old style incandescent lights that look like light bulbs. The advantage of halogen is steadier light (it doesn’t warm up over time). The disadvantages are expense (a halogen light kit can easily cost over $1,000), and the bulbs burn very hot. Very. When installing a bulb, you can’t allow your fingers to touch it. The oil from your hands will cause the bulb to explode. This is why most halogen fixtures have a little screen over them.
LED — LED lighting is becoming the rage these days, and it is pushing halogen lighting out of first place. While LED lighting is good for video, and there may be a lot of advantages in the future for this kind of space age lighting, I don’t think it’s totally ready for prime time yet. The technology is somewhat nascent, and the price/performance ratio isn’t good. LED lighting can give a strange purple cast to skin tones. The kits are also very expensive per lumen (a measure of light).
Fluorescent — I don’t like fluorescent light – not a bit. I don’t like fluorescent bulbs in my home environment. Yes, they’re energy efficient, but the insides are poison, they’re tough to recycle, and the light itself makes people look like greenish ghosts. Even the so-called “photo” fluorescent bulbs have a green cast.
If you need inexpensive, go with incandescent. It’s an old proven technology and you can get a good light kit with two spots and two floods for less than $200, including the light stands.
Reflectors — These are handy and inexpensive things to have around. While it’s true that you can get away with a piece of white poster board to bounce sunlight to use as a fill light, decent reflectors are cheap enough to afford a few of them. There are some very nice reflectors that are pretty big, but they fold out into nice tiny round shapes. They come in white, silver, and bronze to reflect that color of light to your subject. Prices run from $20 for a 20” reflector to the $70 range for a 38” or 48” reflector. You can also get light diffusers that go between the subject and the light itself. The same people who make reflectors make these diffusers. Reflectors are really handy to fill in light when you’re shooting in sunlight, which can be really harsh.
Microphones and headphones
Microphones — Good sound is important for your production. DO NOT rely on the microphone that comes with most cameras, even the ones that come with the high-end (expensive) HD cameras. Why a $25,000 camera has a cheapo built in mic is beyond me, but there they are.
Depending on the kind of shooting you’re doing, you might want a lavaliere mic (get a wireless one); this is the type that clips onto a lapel or collar. These are fairly omnidirectional (they can hear sounds all around them), so you have to be in a quiet environment to use one successfully. These mics start as low as $149 for a wireless set up (sending unit, receiver and microphone) and up to $3,000 (yes, three thousand dollars). A perfect compromise is about $250 or so.
Speaking of wireless, there are two flavors: VHF and UHF. VHF mics operate on the same frequencies as fire departments, police, etc. and you can sometimes run into interference … as in the middle of a scene when a voice that’s not your talent says something about a fire.
Handheld microphones are perfect for stand up interviews, but I can’t imagine many cases where you’d be doing a standup interview for e-Learning. There are several flavors of handheld mics, including dynamic, condenser, cardioid, and ribbon. Prices range from $75 for a passable mic to $900 for overkill. You just aren’t going to hear the difference between the $900 mic and a cheaper one in the finished product, especially if learners will only play it back on computer speakers.
There are the “small diaphragm” condenser mics. You normally put them in a stand of some sort, and they are really best for radio or TV commentators (where the networks usually use a lavaliere anyway).
If you need to capture sound from far away, or want to capture ambient sound, then you need a shotgun mic. There are accessories like parabolic reflectors so you can really “zoom in” on a sound if you want to capture the warble of the exceedingly rare Red Thrashing Thrushed Thrasher for a documentary you’re doing (hey, that’s e Learning too!). These mics run from $100 to $6,000 (yikes) and the expensive ones come in matched sets and in a handmade wooden box. Give me a break … it’s video.
Finally, for recording voiceovers directly into your computer, some very good cheap microphones that plug into a USB port are available. The one that comes to mind is a Snowball, and it works really well for voiceovers. I just picked up a second one for $42 at Amazon while it was on sale.
Headphones — You absolutely need a decent set of headphones, preferably over the ear-style monitor headphones. You should never use your camera while recording live sound without having headphones on your head. Good headphones start at around $75 and go up from there. Start your search for headphones at a video supply store like B & H Photo, http://www.bhphotovideo.com. Read reviews before you buy.
Computer
Yes, you need one. Mac or PC? Check out Part 1 of my “10 Myths About Video in e-Learning” article (Learning Solutions, May 3, 2010) for that answer (http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/454/ten-myths-about-video-in-e-learning---part-1). Whether you’re using a Mac or a PC for your video production, the faster the processor, the more cores, and the most memory you can afford, is always better. If you get the new version of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, and if you have a recent nVidia card that has the CUDA architecture, then Premiere Pro will take advantage of your video card to play back and render your video very fast. It’s an amazing technological breakthrough … or so it seems to me. I’ve had more stuttering playback where I’ve spent time trying to get my display up to speed. For memory, 4 GB is fine – 8 GB is better, and you really start to fly with 16GB of RAM. Regarding processors, dual core is OK, quad is better, and six is better yet, because most video editing software can take advantage of all those cores of computing power and goodness. By the way, video editing is one of the few classes of software that does take advantage of multiple processor cores. Photoshop does too, but we’re concerned with video. I personally edit on the go and use a laptop with a quad core processor, 16GB of RAM, and about a terabyte of storage in two hard drives. This allows me to do almost all my video editing on location. Compared to the very fast laptop I had before, it’s very fast.
I’m not going to write about software here, because this is a hardware article. Be patient. My article on editing software is coming to Learning Solutions in September.
Camera
Finally! The camera. Some say it’s the foundation that you build all video on. It’s not, and you can make video-not-video without a camera, but that’s a different story. (Editor’s note: “video-not-video” refers to video done with stills and words ... moving the stills and the words around.)
Today you can get cameras that range in price from $100 to $100,000. But what do you really need to shoot video for e-Learning? This is what you don’t need: a $100 or $150 Flip or Webbie – that’s what you don’t need. And you don’t need an HD camera either (see the 10 Myths article, Part 2) … but you can’t really buy a camera without HD anymore. There just aren’t any. However you can switch most cameras down to Standard Definition video (~720 X 480 pixels) and you’ll have the advantage of being able to work faster because you’re pushing around a lot fewer pixels than HD video. And, let’s face it; you’re not going to use your video at full resolution. If you’re lucky, you’re probably going to display video on the Web site at 360 X 240 pixels, so what good does high resolution do in e-Learning? I don’t know. Read over the 10 Myths article.
What does money buy in a more expensive video camera? It buys several things … the most important of which is low light performance. When shooting in low light (and low can mean inside, even with lights), the picture from an inexpensive camera can be very grainy and low resolution. This is really bad! There are many reasons for this. Chip sensitivity, chip noise, the quality of the lens, the quality of the processor in the camera (there is a video processor inside a camera) and more. If you’re going to shoot indoors, and not always outside on a bright sunny day, then spend a little more on a camera.
The other important thing you get when you spend more on a camera is chips. More expensive cameras have three chips: red, blue, and green. These divide the video signal into three discrete channels, and that gives you more control and makes correcting the video that much easier during post-production.
My parting advice
You should know this about video cameras: Don’t use a DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex camera) to shoot video – at least not yet. Maybe one or two generations down the road the DSLR will be the camera of choice, but for now, it’s not a good choice for shooting video. I do know that many professional productions have used DSLRs to shoot major shows, but DSLRs were not designed to shoot video – they were designed to shoot still images. A good DSLR can have a marvelous chip, but DSLR processors just aren’t speedy enough yet. In addition, while the software inside a DSLR might record video, it’s not video recording software. The most important thing of all is that DSLRs have so much resolution that they literally have to drop lines of resolution to get down to a reasonable number of pixels that they can record. I’d LOVE to use my Nikon to shoot video and have all my lenses to use, but it’s just not there yet.
The whole trick with video hardware is to get the very best picture you can. It’s easy to grunge up later, but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear as the old saying goes. And bad video is definitely a sow’s ear.
