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General discussion

Video Interviews for Our Company

May 25, 2006 1:47AM PDT

Hi everyone,

I am a newbie at video cameras and I need some help. I'm hoping the experts out there could shed some light...

As a way to continue educating our employees our company wants to video record interviews and post them on our intranet. We want the video to look professional so we need a video camera that will capture good video(lighting etc) and good audio. Can anyone recommend a camera?

Some additional questions:

1. Do I need microphone hookup to get good audio? Is there such a thing as wireless microphones?

2. Do all cameras convert video to a web-compatible format? Is that format MWAV?

3. Will we need some kind of video server to host these video clips?

Any other tips for making our video presentation project a success would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Piet

Discussion is locked

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Do you have a budget?????? Lets start with basics.
May 25, 2006 4:54AM PDT

1.For best results a Pro camera that has mic inputs so you can put a lapel mic on the person speaking. $2000~3000. You can use wired or wireless. Add at least $1000 for a lapel mic and some lights.

2.A good PC that has a firewire card in it so you can import the video from the camera and edit your video. Once you have your finished video it can converted into may formats, MPG, AVI, WMV, etc.
3. There are a couple of ways to do this, the easest way would be to have a list of videos that the employee can click on and download it to thier PC and then play it there.
3a. Set up a streaming server ( M$ or Realplayer) the employee will click on a video and it will be streamed to thier PC. Both of the above will add a lot of traffic to your network. Check with you IT dept. about this.
3b. Burn them to a CD ( You can easly put a one hour program on a CD using wmv or rm) then then employee can just play them on thier PCs.
Some info about editting video at the link. John

http://www.timwerx.net/odds/pcfile.htm

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Some more questions
May 25, 2006 7:39AM PDT

Okay, that was a lot of good information...thank you.

I was a little shocked at the price. What if I wanted to make the video look semi-professional. No additional spot lights (hopefull a well-lit room will do). Also, if the prices you referenced were because of the mic, would a video camera's built-in mic pick up/create satisfactory audio? Lastly, will the video cameras I see for $500 - $1,000 not do well for what I am trying to achieve?

Thanks again,

Piet

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Inexpensive microphone
May 26, 2006 1:04PM PDT
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Inexpensive microphone
May 30, 2006 1:58AM PDT

Thanks monkeyman, I'll be looking into this.