Comments

richard-amirault wrote on 11/7/2011, 11:00 AM
What is a ... "'Steve Jobs' style shoot"?

20 - 30 feet is quite a distance. Will you have to have the lights that far as well?
EGS wrote on 11/7/2011, 12:42 PM
Ya know - when Steve Jobs would present new products and refer to a screen next to him. Yes, the lights may have to be that far away, or maybe a bit closer and off to the sides somewhat. Another app for these lights would be recording a choir. For the choir, I'd probably try to clamp the lights onto my main 2 mic stands, which would be approx 20-30 feet from the stage. Thanks for any suggestions !!!
richard-amirault wrote on 11/7/2011, 1:44 PM
when Steve Jobs would present new products and refer to a screen next to him.

Only saw that in bits and pieces .. but I think I know what you mean .. however, the "screen" part of it make this a really difficult lighting assignment. You don't want to wash out the screen, but you want enough light for the presenter.

Really tough to do from a distance. You will likely need to light the person from the sides so that as little light falls on the screen as possible.

Also you don't want to over-light the person and have the screen go too dark.
EGS wrote on 11/7/2011, 6:54 PM
Yes - it's challenging. Any specific lights for me to look at? What do you think of LEDs?
richard-amirault wrote on 11/8/2011, 8:38 PM
Sorry .. I'm no expert on lighting. I did spend about $800 on a incandescent light kit from B&H Photo Video a few weeks ago :-) .. but those lights would not work in your situation.

It is possible, depending on the room, that you may not need any extra lights.

In order for us to better help you, can you tell us more about the room and where in the room you are able to place lights?
vectorizer wrote on 11/11/2011, 11:57 AM
The one time I tried to do this, if I turned up the camcorder gain to get the person lit enough, the projected images would be completely washed out. I think this is very hard to do without professional lighting on your subject.

I did get a decent movie in the end though, but it was a hack. I shot the person exposed well, and also got the projected slides in the same frame but they were washed out. Did it from an angle (and instructing the subject) such that he would not get in front of the screen. Then I got the Powerpoint slide file from the presenter; using Powerpoint 2010 I generated a WMV movie file of the presentation. Then in VMS I resized and lined up the generated presentation movie frame with the overexposed live shot. It was a lot of boring work to get the frame changes in the generated file to synchronize with the slide changes in the live video, but it worked -- and the slides were probably more readable than I could possibly get live.