Business Strategies 4 Shooting Stills and HD Video Simultaneously during Photoshoot?

[majordslr]

Greetings all,

I have been shooting photography and video for some time, and I am enrolled in a summer-school class where we are to come up with a brief business plan for our future photography/videography ventures.

Well, I am going to build a brand around shooting stills and video simultaneously, and I was wondeirng if anyone might have any recommendations as how best shoot hd video and stills at the same time throughout the shoot. Who are the leaders in this field?

Do any of you mount two cameras together (Such as a video camera and dslr), or set up dedicated video cameras or still cameras DSLRs on tripods? What brackets/systems/methods do you use for mounting stills and video cameras, and/or shooting stills and video together at the same time?

And of course, I will also be including a section on audio in my business plan, so any tips would rock!

Just looking for some ideas! & if I use your original idea, I'll be more than happy to provide you a reference!

Thanks in advance for the advice and insights! I will look forward to sharing the final plan with y'all.

MD

[IABoomer]

I cannot imagine one person shooting video and stills at the same time successfully. Each type of shooting requires the full attention of the shooter, so there's going to be painful compromises made trying to do both at once.

For example, let's just say that you've got a bracket or something setup where your video and still camera are mounted together and are both in landscape (horizontal) orientations. Now, you want to shoot a vertical portrait of someone. You turn the still camera to frame them, and your video footage goes sideways and people watching the video throw up from the fast rotation.

Or, you're futzing around with your video camera zooming in on say a bride and groom and miss a still of them kissing or doing the twisted-arms champagne sip because you're busy with the video camera.

If you were doing a "behind the scenes of a photoshoot" type of video, then a compact wearable video camera might work okay, but for getting good smooth video and varied stills, you need a second shooter.

[majordslr]

I cannot imagine one person shooting video and stills at the same time successfully. Each type of shooting requires the full attention of the shooter, so there's going to be painful compromises made trying to do both at once.

For example, let's just say that you've got a bracket or something setup where your video and still camera are mounted together and are both in landscape (horizontal) orientations. Now, you want to shoot a vertical portrait of someone. You turn the still camera to frame them, and your video footage goes sideways and people watching the video throw up from the fast rotation.

Or, you're futzing around with your video camera zooming in on say a bride and groom and miss a still of them kissing or doing the twisted-arms champagne sip because you're busy with the video camera.

If you were doing a "behind the scenes of a photoshoot" type of video, then a compact wearable video camera might work okay, but for getting good smooth video and varied stills, you need a second shooter.

This guy seems to be shooting stills & video at the same time in a cool way:

War Photog Blends Video, Stills for New Combat Views | Danger Room | Wired.com

Ziv Koren is a world-renown combat photographer whose coverage of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has vaulted him to international acclaim. Now, he’s helping invent a whole new visual aesthetic that digitally combines still photos with moving images, seamlessly.

Koren has spent years shooting for titles, including Time Magazine, the New York Times, and Paris Match. His photograph of the aftermath of a suicide bombing of an Israeli bus was selected by the World Press Photo Organisation in 2000 as one of the most important photos in the last 45 years. But when film director Solo Avital asked Koren to be the subject of the documentary, "More than 1000 Words," the photographer found his work started to expand beyond the still, frozen frame.

In order to film Koren on the West Bank, Gaza and other hot zones, the filmmakers devised a small "finger camera" to mount on Koren¹s lens. Avital says it was the only way to get close to Koren without attracting too much attention.
But the result is that you can see Koren’s subjects as he does — through his lens. And that gives much more information, about both the photographer and the photographed.

Certainly we wouldn't tell him to stop because it is impossible, as he is showing it is possible! And i a war zone during combat!



Anybody else see anything like this out there? The more I think about it, the more I am excited about potentialities.

[Photoboothguy]

Don't confuse possible with feasible. Yes, it is possible to do both, but probably won't work too well.

When I shoot weddings, I shoot 8-10 hours. A 5D Mark II, 70-200mm IS, and 580exII are heavy enough without adding a small video camera to it. Then there's the matter of storage...figure 10GB/hour of high def video, and that's 80gb of storage (and the extra hardware) attached to your body. All that to get a shaky video shot through a small, crappy lens.

Yeah, it might work okay for an hour or two in documentary war video, but a wedding video like that will look like a 5-year-old did it.

[jdepould]

Shooting them absolutely simultaneously isn't going to give you good results, and the shutter will be in your audio. If you don't need big prints, you're better off pulling frames out of the video.

[majordslr]

Don't confuse possible with feasible. Yes, it is possible to do both, but probably won't work too well.

When I shoot weddings, I shoot 8-10 hours. A 5D Mark II, 70-200mm IS, and 580exII are heavy enough without adding a small video camera to it. Then there's the matter of storage...figure 10GB/hour of high def video, and that's 80gb of storage (and the extra hardware) attached to your body. All that to get a shaky video shot through a small, crappy lens.

Yeah, it might work okay for an hour or two in documentary war video, but a wedding video like that will look like a 5-year-old did it.

Thanks!

Just came across someone talking about shooting stills and video simultaneously in the context of weddings @ diy photography:

A DIY 9Shooter: Shooting Stills & Video Simultaneously & Audio Too! | DIYPhotography.net

Here are some ideas of possible uses for the 45surf 9shooter system:

1) Shooting swimsuit models! (or any models for that matter) the model's time is valuable and hard drives and SD cards are cheap! let the video track your every shot throughout a 2 hour shoot, and you will have lots of cool video! more than enough for a two minute or ten minute video!

2) Shooting weddings -- Imagine shooting a two hour wedding, and then being able to offer your clients a ten minute wedding video set to Beethoven, tracking the entire wedding from all the best angles. Yes I know many people say that for weddings you want to shoot a lot of portrait shots, so go ahead and rotate the camera! Sure the video will be sideways, but you can discard a lot footage out of a two hour shoot and still have an awesome ten minute video which would add a lot of value, or hey--use some sideways video to make people laugh. Or crop portrait shots in post from the landscapes -- if you shoot with the 5d they will still be huge. And I am working on a portrait-orientation mount.

It links to the 9shooter site where 9shooting is a verb referring to all this...

9shooter Multimount Canon 5D DSLR Camera Multimount Bracket Nineshooter DSLR & VIDEO Nine Shooter Multi Mount for the Canon 5d: Shooting Stills & Video Simultaneously: Multimounting Mics, shotgun Mi




cool!

i need to set up a blog covering the various approaches!

[majordslr]

Shooting them absolutely simultaneously isn't going to give you good results, and the shutter will be in your audio. If you don't need big prints, you're better off pulling frames out of the video.

I think the stills from the video on HD is under 2 megapixels... so kinda too small when compared with the stills (21 mp) in my canon 5d mark ii...

not sure how happy clients would b with < 2 mp stills these days...

[majordslr]

Don't confuse possible with feasible. Yes, it is possible to do both, but probably won't work too well.

When I shoot weddings, I shoot 8-10 hours. A 5D Mark II, 70-200mm IS, and 580exII are heavy enough without adding a small video camera to it. Then there's the matter of storage...figure 10GB/hour of high def video, and that's 80gb of storage (and the extra hardware) attached to your body. All that to get a shaky video shot through a small, crappy lens.

Yeah, it might work okay for an hour or two in documentary war video, but a wedding video like that will look like a 5-year-old did it.

i think it's proving entirely feasible. the guy in the war zone above has an entire documentary/film strip on his work! i mean you've gotta say it's totally feasible after watching the videos with his stills in war zones!

War Photog Blends Video, Stills for New Combat Views | Danger Room | Wired.com

and the 9shooter footage looks decent too.

this is just the beginning i sense and we can improve on the optimum methods.

[BrianD]

Getting the speed, aperture, lighting, ISO, etc for just one of those is a full-time job at a wedding.

Plus, wedding videographers have to do quite a bit of camera movement in order to make their footage interesting, and they use all kinds of equipment (sliders, glidecams, etc.) - so when they're cutting the cake, kissing at the altar, are you going to get a crappy video by standing still or a blurry photo from moving around?

Why not build a brand that offers both, just not at the same time? Either that or hire another person to do the other.

I realize that's not the answer you're looking for, but...having a business plan that's feasible (read: will make money) is more important than being unique. Don't confuse this with being unique from your competition, whether it be your style of finished product, price point, quality, etc.

[majordslr]

Getting the speed, aperture, lighting, ISO, etc for just one of those is a full-time job at a wedding.

Plus, wedding videographers have to do quite a bit of camera movement in order to make their footage interesting, and they use all kinds of equipment (sliders, glidecams, etc.) - so when they're cutting the cake, kissing at the altar, are you going to get a crappy video by standing still or a blurry photo from moving around?

Why not build a brand that offers both, just not at the same time? Either that or hire another person to do the other.

I realize that's not the answer you're looking for, but...having a business plan that's feasible (read: will make money) is more important than being unique. Don't confuse this with being unique from your competition, whether it be your style of finished product, price point, quality, etc.

Well, what if, in addition to having a full time video guy, you also had a second video camcorder attached to your DSLR. That way, during a six hour wedding, you'd also have tons of cool, candid HD video all from the perspective of the photographer! Heck--you could probably just offer the wedding party the unedited 6 hour sd cards for a few hundred bucks. I mean you get married but once!

And too you could edit the video and mix it with the video from the prime video dude. Multiple angles are rule #1 in adding professionalism and context to clips in film school.

And what if your video dude got sick or couldn't make it? What if their camera broke or died?

So much upside to this philosophy that I bet it catches on & all.