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Question

Camcorder, Mic + Tripod for Soccer Instructional Videos

Sep 20, 2013 2:04AM PDT

Hi,

I have been tasked with buying a camcorder with the necessary accessories to create soccer instructional videos for a local soccer organization.

The quality and format of the videos will hopefully be similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsHs4dW4pNY

We have a budget circa $1000.

If anyone has any advice on some simple editing software, that will allow us to add captions and voice-overs at a later time,please also share.

Thanks in advance Happy

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Don't confuse quality with editing effects.
Sep 20, 2013 2:10AM PDT

The video is pretty low quality so ANY camcorder should do fine.

However if you want great audio you would set up an audio recorder and a directional mic to pick up your voice work.

In POST PRODUCTION you bring it all together. You didn't write what you use for POST PRODUCTION so I have to guess that you'll get the usual Apple computer and Final Cut Pro?
bob

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Answer
I agree with Bob.
Sep 21, 2013 12:48AM PDT

The example you provided used two cameras was captured in standard definition video at 4:3 aspect ratio. A few times through the video as the teacher turns to his left, you can see a small black thing - that is the mic element to a wireless lavaliere - hidden where his shirt buttons. There is no way for us to know if the audio is captured separately or into one of the camcorders.

In addition to the camcorders and wireless lav, each camera is tripod mounted (no handheld capture at all). Because this is outside and likely windy, use of a shotgun mic on a boom may work - but that means someone to work the boom, and since the foam wind screen won't work, use of a fuzzie or zeppelin is recommended.

The video editor uses multiple video tracks (that's how the opening is done). Apple's Final Cut Pro (Macintosh OSX) or Sony Vegas (Windows) are worth a look. Adobe Premiere (both platforms) and a few others will work. The learning curve will be as steep as you want to make it, but if you have not done this before, then expect to do some tutorials on YouTube and lots of experimentation to get where you want.

Since the lighting is good, no video lighting is needed.

If the camcorders are expected to do nothing else, the Any in the low end - basically equivalent to the Canon HF R series will do Something from the HF M series would be better because they have better manual audio control.

We assume that the computer to be used for editing can deal with the AVCHD-compressed video the current crop of consumer camcorders captures. RAM, CPU, and adequate external hard drive space are the usual targets. You can do this easily with one camcorder - but need to shoot multiple times from multiple angles and then do more work in editing.

The captions can be done with any drawing app, exported as a jpeg placed on the video (separate track) and titles from the editor are placed over the captions.

Voice overs are easy enough... lots of ways to do that - direct recording onto a computer, recording externally to a digital audio recorder (or camcorder) and imported, with or without external mice... normalizing the audio so it is even throughout the video is fun to do. Audacity is a good app to use. This is where the multiple audio tracks in the video editor come in.