Home Video Hints: Holiday Videos that Rock! (page 2)

Auditoriums and Audio

Audio is always a problem, whether in a room full of excited kids opening gifts or at a school concert with your microphone 50 feet from the choir. For most situations, be prepared to lay a continuous music track under the edited footage, to minimize level changes and sound discontinuities between shots. Since your program is for private family showing only, feel free to use any music you fancy.

In the auditorium, you're pretty much stuck, unless you can club together with another shooter. That way, one of you can lay down a continuous wide shot with an uninterrupted sound track, while the other captures details of the concert. Since a digital copy is as good as the original, you can both have A and B rolls to edit with.

At concerts, parades and wherever else you're stuck in one place, it's tough to vary your point-of-view. Though you can't shift the camera, you can pan and zoom it. Moving in, frame one group of actors or soloists, hold on them, then go to another group. Keep pans and zooms slow and steady because you can't cut them out of the edited tape without losing audio continuity.

You can, however, get audience reaction shots by cheating them:

• During your beloved offspring's solo performance, keep the camcorder on him without a break.
• While some other kid is being a sugar plum fairy, pan around to shoot the audience's rapt attention to the performance.
• When you need a cutaway within your own child's solo, insert the other's kid's audience reaction shot. No one will be able to tell the difference.

Finally, at performances especially, plan to work on a tripod and enable lens stabilization if you have it. It's amazing how tired and shaky your arms can get, holding up a two-pound camcorder for just ten mi…