Where is professional videography headed?
Blog: KWKeirstead's Blog
Thinking of going to 4K? You might want to wait for 8K assuming you want to be able to film what people a mile across a valley are eating for lunch.
Viewing 8K is another matter. Few residences have an attached cinema hall. The likely deal when you buy an 8K TV is you get a discount on the renovation contractor who enlarges your living room – after you have negotiated a variance with the local planning committee to allow your house to be closer to your property line.
I can’t get excited about 8K at all and, until recently, have not had a lot of motivation to trade up to 4K, other than for the ability to crop to HD and still have a good image.
For me, the order of things is the storyline, audio, lighting, camera.
Why? Because you lose the audience if the storyline is bad, next in line comes the audio and, if the lighting is no good, you quickly get to the end of the line i.e. the camera.
My challenges in videography have been to track stage performers as they rapidly glide across a stage, often going from front of stage to back of stage at the same time. To do this right you need a smooth tripod/head that can be managed with one finger and you pretty much have to know where the performers are about to move to so you can track them. For this reason, I go once to take notes, then a 2nd time to practice tracking and yet a 3rd time to do the recording. Imaging the savings if I could lock on faces and have the camera do the tracking.
Out of doors, the technique needs to vary. Here, we also have fast moving objects, often not close together, so you have to master smooth pan and zoom.
Auto-focus makes things a lot easier but it seems to me, based on testing I did a couple of years ago, that unless you move through an arc that lets the camera focus whilst you are panning/zooming, you may, depending on the camera, be in for a longer than desirable settling-in time.
The experimentation I did with my AG-AC160A gave me very fast settling-in-times or rather slow settling-in-times depending on the panning arc I chose to go from a near object to a church a mile or so across and down a river. Imagine the savings if I could lasso a target area on my monitor and have the camera track to the target (panning and zooming along a reasonable arc).
A very recent technology advance, for me, is the DJI Osmo.
Sure, you have to live with the wide angle lens, and low light issues (physics rules) but think of the footage you are likely to get relative to the missing an event entirely because of setup time with a big camera/tripod.
Adapting to the DJI Osmo is not likely to be a picnic.
In the ads, you only see the camera and monitor on top of a handle, but I can see things starting to look a lot less mobile once you start loading down the camera and yourself with accessories. You probably need to add two crew members, one with a portable mixer/recorder and one with a boom mic.
Quite a transition to make for a one-trick pony like me.
Filed under: TECHNOLOGY, Video Production 
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