Hey guys David Risley here with davidrisley.com. And today, over on davidrisley.com, I posted a post about how to get the best quality video for internet screening which is what you’re watching this on right now. And so what I thought I would do would be for today’s video is to actually talk about the equipment that I used to record videos now on davidrisley.com.
Now, the reason this videos are called flip tips by the way is because for the longest time, I use this which is a flip video. It’s actually a flip—HD. You can probably see it there. It’s a HD and it’s a really cool little camera. Now, it’s good for portability, obviously it’s really, really small however the quality is questionable. It does do HD quality however, if you really want your videos to look professional, you’re going to have a difficult time with this only because it’s got no stabilization so if you’re walking around doing stuff it’s going to look real shaky. The other thing is that the zoom is only 2X and when you do zoom sometimes quality does not look that good. I mean a lot of times they’ll look kind of grainy or look a little blurry something like that so pretty much it’s just a one X whenever you see is what you get. If you try to zoom, it’s not going to look that great. And the other thing is it’s got no audio input so it just uses a little speaker that are on it to pick up sounds so what happen is all the sound sounds kind of echo where it takes up all the background noise.
I mean for a camera this size is fantastic but you have to realize a camera this size has limitations to it which is why I am now using another camera here in my office and it’s also a portable camera so I can take it out and do stuff with it. And then what I’m going to do now is I’m going to switch over to this camera and I’m going to show you the camera that you’re watching on right now and then we’ll come back and I’ll talk a little bit about the audio.
Okay so now, I’m standing up and we’re back on the flip menu HD so you can kind of tell the definite audio difference here and I just want to show you the other camera. So, let’s pop on over here, there it is. Now, what this is that looks like a really—they looks a—out on my camera to be honest with you but here’s the camera. It’s actually a Canon VIXIA HF100 and you can see that I’ve got the screen pointed at me right now. If you look over here, that’s where I was just sitting so I've got that screen pointed in me so that I can actually see myself and the lens is wide open and so this thing, it’s an HD Camera, it’s a 1080p camera which is incredibly high much more than I actually need for the internet. However, the lens quality are superior by far over the flip menu HD so therefore the handle is light better, the handle’s a lot of things better. It’s got image stabilization.
Now, this thing on the top is actually called a shot gun microphone. Now, it’s got this—looking thing on it but what this is, is just basically a wind filter. If I were to take that off, you’d see that that’s what the actual microphone looks like. Does this filter basically just goes on it in order to filter out background noise and things like that? Now, what this thing does—is it more properly focuses the—it gives the sounds directly in front of the camera and that’s what it picks up better than everything else.
Now, if we go look at the furry farthest camera right here are actually two little microphone areas. The problem is that on the directional microphone so it picks everything on the room including all background noise so the idea would be that I put these on top of it and it filter all those stuff out. Now, it’s not perfect. This is pretty good mic but it’s not perfect and that’s what you were listening to me on just a bit ago but in a second I’ll show you what I use as well.
Okay, we’re back on the other camera now so you probably notice there’s a definite difference in quality here. And again, you’re listening to me right now that shock microphone that it shows with a dead cat on this, you know, surrounding it. Just so you guys know this camera does have a remote control that’s how I’m turning this thing on and off right now. And if I want it to zoom in, I can for example get you closer to me than you actually want to see and I can back pack out again but the other thing I want to show you here was this thing. It is a—microphone, this one is made by Audio Technical and now this is my second one. I have one down here on the floor right now that I’m not actually using right now but basically what this is a little thumb microphone so what you’ll see sometimes with me when I record videos now is you’ll see me wearing a microphone on my shirt. And so the mic is right here, it picks up my voice very clearly and it actually has a wire that goes across and plugs in at the back of this camera. But that’s a big thing, if you’re shopping for a higher quality of camera is to make sure that it has a mic input jack. A lot of them don’t but you need to make definite sure that it does have it because what the problem is otherwise is that the audience going to sound really dispersed and not that good so definitely get this—I got this thing on Amazon.com. It was only 16 bucks or 17 bucks. They’re not expensive. The reason why this one is cheap is because it’s wired.
Now, if you go for a wireless one, that’s cool. You know basically you have a wireless transmitter on your belt. You got it—and then you have a receiver near the camera. The problem is you’re going to be dealing with issues of the reception of that. You’re going to be dealing with a lot of issues. I actually did buy a wireless and I was not happy at all with the sound quality so that was a $90.00 mic by the way, the one that I tried earlier this one 16 brought sounds a lot better it’s because it’s not using wireless. So, that’s pretty much what I’m using now. And by the way for editing software, I’m just using iMovie came with Mac. If you’re on windows, you can use windows movie maker and the only thing you want to keep in mind is that with this particular camera which is really, really HD, you’re going to need to pay attention on what you're used for editing that goes.
I don’t know that much about this stuff but I know that uses something called AV CHD or something like that and some really modern recording format or something like that and what happens is a lot of editing software won’t just going to handle it. It’s just too much data or something like that. Now iMovie can deal with it, that’s one of the cool things I like about the Mac is that we can plug stuff into it and it usually just works.
Now, I’ve heard some people say you have to use special software that came to this camera in order to get movies off of it. I’ve also heard that Sony Vegas which is apparently a pretty good piece of software can deal with this format of movies just fine so you might have to deal with that. But one way the other you’ll be able to get your footage off the camera and then play with it the way you see fit. So anyway, that is a rough overview of the equipment that I’m now using to produce internet video and hopefully that was helpful to you. Catch you guys later.
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