The things you wish you’d remembered before it was too late

I now make it a rule to write a ‘things still to do’
list as I go through the setup of a show. I didn’t always…

A note on S-Video connections

S-Video is a great thing for vloblive technicians – it gives you a lot of the benefit of component video in terms of quality, without increasing the cable count too much. The big downer of S-Video is that, invariably it requires connection with those horrible little miniDIN plugs. Not only are they hard to orient in a hurry, but the pins bend easily and they have no mechanical locking mechanism. Here’s one way around it…

What is the best kind of connector to use for video interconnect?

If you are using a whole mixture of equipment, chances are you have a mixture of BNC, phono and maybe even other connector types for your video interconnect. Which is best and why?…

What do I do if my camera postions turn out to be unusable?

You set up a camera position and discover that once you see the positions of people and things on stage, your main shots are being blocked. What do you do?

What is the best order to set up your equipment?

It may seem a bit trivial, but in my experience the order that you do things in can make a big difference between getting everything running for a gig in the time available or ending up running around in a panic at the last minute, or having to run a show without some vital piece of equipment.

Hey, you’re encouraging low standards in live video!

I guess on one reading of this site I could be accused of encouraging the ‘cheap and cheerful’ brigade to say “it’s OK to do live video on the cheap, and to fob off the general public with sub-standard implementations of inadequate systems”. But that would be missing the point…