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CleanStarts

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Carl Karsten edited this page Mar 20, 2019 · 6 revisions

Production of a video includes making it start nicely. "Start" in this context is the time during witch everyone is transitioning from before the talk has started to after the talk has started. It varies from talk to talk. 10 to 30 seconds is typical.

We want the viewer to engage in the content being taught, not distracted by poor production quality.

We want to avoid this:

I actually stopped the video and restarted it a couple times just to be sure I had not missed something at the beginning because it sounded as if the video was starting in the middle of the presentation. I have been in conferences where this sort of disorganized start of a presentation occurs, but I never paid attention to the video recording of same. However, usually the speaker will right him/herself and say, something like, "Now that we have the Powerpoint running correctly, let me introduce myself....."

This is true for the entire video, but the start is a hot spot for both troublesome content and poor editing choices.

There are many things that can cause a poor start, such as:

  • Presenter getting their laptop hooked up
  • Mic and audio problems
  • Presenter engaging in small talk
  • lack of clear introduction - can't tell if the dialogue is small talk or presentation.
  • The talk announcer (aka MC, Session Chair) including irrelevant dialogue, like details about lunch that are not at all interesting to anyone watching the video.
  • someone off camera talking instead of the person at the lectern.

In general these problems don't have much impact on the local audience in the room. The audience has additional insight into what is going on, they can see and hear everything in the room, not just what the camera and mic is picking up, and they have a lower expectation of perfection - they know it takes a bit of fiddling with laptops and mics, that will happen regardless of if it is part of the video or not. The local audience will stay seated and not be too distracted.

Solutions:

Make a concerted effort to have a clean start.

Get all of the cruft over and done with before the talk starts, signal that the talk is starting so that the video producer knows where that point in time is.

This can be accomplished if there is an MC (a person who asks everyone to take a seat, then announces the presenter) uses a check list, such at this one:

Big Red Button: someone presses it, it lights up to indicate "talk is in process" like "recording" or "live" over a recording studio.

Examples of less then clean:

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