shooting TV/ smartscreen onstage

[Gary-Y]

Does anyone have experience shooting the pastor with notes on a flatscreen staged behind them?

Our team asked about moving sermon notes to a laptop on stage and outputting to a flat screen or a smart screen. The idea is to include the notes on the camera for IMAG instead of doing thirds etc. This would also allow for one-step video capture for playback to venues.

Any thoughts, suggestions, cautions?

[tdangelo]

Yes, I shoot quite a bit with plasma & LCD screens on stage with the presenter. I recently posted a link to uTube with New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg in such a configuration.

My thoughts/comments would be:

If the screen is going to be upstage & behind the talent consider getting a screen big enough to have the content read well considering that if the screen is in landscape view the talent will likely block 1/2 to 2/3 the image.

If the screen is going to be offstage of the talent consider that all shots with the screen essently become a two-shot (meaning the camera will need to zoom out to frame two things, the screen and the pastor) verses one. If the screen is in landscape that will force the shot wider making the talent smaller. Consider instead mounting the screen portrait and creating the content in that mode.

Get a screen with adjustable color temperatures or plan on also getting a color corrector. Unless you are very lucky the screen will likely not match your lighting color temperature exactly requiring color temperature adjustment in the screen or upstream of the screen in the screen feed signal.

LCD screens are preferable as plasmas can burn-in graphics that stay on the screen too long.

[Gary-Y]

Thanks so much Tom.
I'm going to do some tests this afternoon.

[andrewf]

We do this and use a 55" LCD screen.

We still control the points from up-top (booth) and have a confidence monitor on the front seating area for him to know what is going on, without having to always look behind him.

He usually walks over and references it as needed.

We don't use it for every series.

I dont have enough posts yet to make a link to one of the messages on Vimeo.