Camera Work: On with the Show!

On with the Show!

If you're a parent or a teacher or a church or club member, chances are you've wanted to tape some sort of auditorium program--a play, a musical, a lecture, perhaps a concert. It may have been as elaborate as a full- length Handel's Messiah, or as simple as the Food Groups pageant in which your eight-year-old played a complex carbohydrate.

And if you've actually recorded an event like this, you know that the results are often disappointing, with grubby color, muddy sound, and an overall feeling of distance from the subject.

We can't help you produce tapes as good as Live from the Met on PBS (unless you're sitting on a million bucks worth of hardware) but we can supply all kinds of tips for better auditorium videos. (For a fuller treatment of the subject, see Ken Benedict's "Shooting Plays and Recitals" in the May, 1995 issue of Videomaker.)

But before we start, we need to acknowledge one problem with performance taping that you can't completely solve without studio-grade equipment: color qu…

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