Two camera coverage eases the shooting and edit process in the traditional interview.
Today, I use two small High Definition cameras to give simultaneous “close-up” and “medium” shots. With matching cameras and the ability to line up the two videos on the non-linear edit system’s “timeline,” cutting back and forth between the cameras is cleaner with faster production. This has been possible only in the past few years with significant advances in camera quality and size and a dramatic reduction in price.
Shooting a Nightline “live shot” in Colombia in the days when we traveled with a half-ton of gear.
I’ve always been interested in applying new technologies to my work. I started in the industry at a time when each skill was a specialty handled by a single person. This was understandable when you remember the complexities and sensitivity of the gear: cameras got their own airline seat when traveling for the networks and the operator spent his first hours on-site registering and aligning, tweaking to a grid chart. The two-person video/audio team carried more than 300 pounds of gear. Video editors lugged huge cases with multiple video decks, playback on one, record to the other. It was a tortuous, time-consuming process of straight cuts. Today cameras aren’t affected by travel (although I still try to handcarry) and the 600+ pounds of edit gear is a five pound laptop that can do more than we could ever have imagined back in the day.
Covering the Lady Lake. Florida tornado for the Red Cross with a small HD camera on a monopod.
The team in the field is no longer a shooter, soundman, producer and editor. Now it may be one person doing it all. The equipment has come a long way to make this possible. The quality’s up, the price is down and non-linear edit systems are fairly intuitive. But the demands on the “Preditor” (PRoducer-EDITOR) can be enormous. Our 900 pounds of gear is now less than 50. But being able to move from reporting to camera to editing takes a huge skill set and understanding that comes with field experience — working under pressure and anticipating what needs to happen and how to do it.
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