Video Podcasting help for a NUBE

[savedbygrace490]

Hello,
I found this forum while looking for help doing my church's video podcast. I am an IT guy, so the IT part of this is pretty straight forward to me. What I need help with is the multi-media aspect of doing a video podcast. I attend a small church of around 200. We can't afford to invest in high dollar a/v equipment, but I would like to get a video podcast online. I did an initial test using my sony handycam and posted it to podbean.com under savedbygrace490.podbean.com (the forum wont let me post a link)

Obviously the quality is not what I would like. I am asking for some pointers to improve the quality without spending thousands of dollars on equipment. Here are my observations thus far, 1) I need to invest in a good tripod that will pan smoothly. 2) I need to adjust the church lighting to remove the lights behind the speaker. 3) I have to figure out how to get the files from the handycam into ipod format in a better manner. What I did was use Windows media import to suck the video off the camcorder into an AVI file as well as burn a DVD for backup purposes. Then I used QuickPlayer to export it to a M4V file in Ipod format. Then I uploaded the M4V to podbean. Unfortunatly each one of these steps was an hour or so in lenghth and the video quality got poorer with each step. (it acutally looked pretty good when viewing from the camcorder).

One thing I am noticing is that when you stay in "windows" formats, the quality looks better, but when I got to quickplayer the quality looks worse. I suspect it would be just the opposite if I was working on a Mac.

I am hopeing there is someone on the forum that has been here before and can give me some pointers to help me get where we want to go. We have a GREAT church, and I would really like to get our message out.

[waynehoskins]

I don't know much about camcorder stuff (we've got a setup more in line with television than with camcorder), but one thing jumped out at me. In lighting, especially for television, you do want backlight on your subject, so he stands out from the background instead of disappearing into it. I don't know if this is what you meant by "the lights behind the speaker" or not.

And as you observed, you want to minimize the number of data conversion steps you have to take. Digital video doesn't suffer from generational loss in the media degradation sense like analog does, but it does suffer heavily from generational loss of the codec-introduced artifact type. The fewer transcoding steps you have to go through, the better it is.