We are always asked “Do you use a Teleprompter?” The answer is yes, we do. We have been using one for about a year now. I’ve recorded this video (without a prompter) to share why we use it and exactly what prompter and software we are using.

We get a ton of questions about our announcements so I thought I’d upload an entire After Effects project with all the source files. You can see all the keyframes,  masks, and what blend modes we use to get a pseudo chromo key.  Everything is highly compressed or has a watermark on it just for licensing and download purposes. You’ll need to have CS5 to open it up, but if anyone knows how to save a version to CS4, let me know so we can make it available for more people.

• Click here to download the After Effects project. (updated link)
• Click here to watch the announcements in our weekend service.

Shooting on green screen has its challenges, so here are five tips that will help you get a cleaner key and more natural backgrounds.

• The most important thing is lighting. If you don’t evenly and brightly light your curtain or wall you’ll be spending some frustrating time in post. Evenly lighting your wall means it should be the same brightness from top to bottom and left to right. You can check this with a waveform monitor and some cameras have them built in.

• Keep your subject as far from the wall as you can to avoid light from the green screen bleeding onto your subject. If you’re not framing up full body shots then avoid standing on green, it will reflect green light into the shadows and cause some problems when keying.

• Use a higher shutter speed to help cut down on motion blur. Motion blur creates soft spots that will mix the green into your subject and it’s tough to key without losing some edge detail. I like to set my shutter at 1/120th. Now check out this tutorial to help you get started on basic color keying.

• Replace the background with something more interesting than a solid color or and less distracting than a stock animation. Keep it subtle. You can find some great textures to use at YouWorkForThem.

• Add a small amount of blur to your backgrounds to help your subject stand out and your backgrounds will look more natural, too. I use “fast blur” in After Effects with the amount set to 3 or 4 on a wide shot. The tighter the shot the more blur you’ll need.

Getting someone to come to life and have personality on camera can take a lot of coaching and directing. Just telling someone to up their energy is pretty vague advice to give and usually only yields more hand motions and an extra smile.

Something we’ve found that helps bring out personality and life is to ask the talent to speak with more volume, to speak loud enough to clearly reach someone in the back of the studio. When you speak louder you speak with more confidence and it helps personality to show through on camera. It will feel unnatural for most people at first, because it is unnatural, so you’ll have to keep pushing them to be louder through the entire script. Give it a try and see how much more energy comes through on camera and how much more you can connect with your audience.

Here’s a quick look at how we shoot our video announcements.

Here’s a quick list of everything you might have already assumed that we use in our post-production workflow. Let me add that all of this stuff won’t make your stories and ideas better - they’ll just make it easier to produce/convey them.

We have two edit rooms. Really these rooms are just me and Chris’ offices, but for the sake of sounding professional, let’s go with Edit Room for the remainder of this post. Each of our rooms are about identical in hardware and software. Here’s my not-too-technical rundown:

HARDWARE

• Mac Pro with 4TB eSata external drive for Time Machine backups
• M-Audio Studiophile CX5 monitors connected by an M-Audio USB FastTrack
• Two comfy chairs and a lamp

We shoot everything on P2 cards so we have no tape back up. It’s very important to have a backup of all our current projects in case a drive goes down or I hit the “delete important files” shortcut on my keyboard. We have a few 1TB internal drives (which means three I just found out) inside our Mac Pro. One is used as the OS X System and the other two are RAID 0, which means they are connected and files are split between the two drives for extra performance. Do not ever do this unless you have a constant backup of that drive. That’s what our 4TB drive does - backs up all of our current work.

SOFTWARE

• Apple Final Cut Suite (all that we use in the suite is Final Cut, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro)
• Adobe Production Premium (we only use After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop)

FINAL CUT PLUG-INS

• Magic Bullet Looks. We color grade everything with this. They’re great presets that we usually use as a starting place and make tweaks to the exact feel we’re going after.
• The Foundry: Furnace Core. The frame blending for slow-motion in Final Cut is terrible to say the least. This plugin allows us to dramatically change the speed of clips while maintaining smoothness between frames.

AFTER EFFECTS PLUG-INS

• Magic Bullet Looks. Same as what we use in Final Cut.
• Trapcode Particular. Very cool particle generator and simple to use. If you’ve ever seen stars or flying Christmas ornaments in our services, this has been its creator.
• Videocopilot Optical Flares. We got this when we started working on this years easter service opener. Very simple to use and creates lens flares JJ Abrams would be proud of.
• AEScripts.com. Click here for a few time-saving scripts. Specifically LayerChain and Magnum. I use LayerChain for parenting a ton of layers to the layer right above itself when creating that faux 3D look. Magnum - The Edit Detector is used when I bring in the edited video announcements. It analyzes the video and separates it into layers automatically.

If you’re using something you love that’s not on my list, I’d like to hear about it and maybe add it to my list. Just drop it in the comment box.

Here’s a quick list/rant of what we can’t live without when we pack up for a video shoot.

I’ll start with the most important thing - the idea. We spend almost as much time thinking through our ideas as we do shooting them. If you know why you’re making the video and where it falls in your service, you might save yourself some time during the production. Talk it through and second guess yourself until someone tells you to stop.

Next: our mics. You can make bad video look pretty good (see Ronette’s story on Vimeo), but you’re stuck if you have crummy audio. Make it a priority to capture clean audio. We mostly use a Schoeps shotgun mic for studio shoots and a Sennheiser 416 shotgun mic for locations. We use a Lectrosonic wireless pack with a Tram lav and a Senneheiser ew G2 when we need to go wireless.

This is my favorite part: our camera. We use a Panasonic HPX170 and it’s awesome for the price. We also attach a Letus extreme lens adapter with a 50mm Zeiss lens. That dude will wear you out if you try going handheld, but it looks amazing. Is it too obvious to mention a lens cleaning kit?

To visually take your video to the next level you need some proper lighting equipment. We use a couple 5-in-1 reflector/diffusers anytime we light. If you have a few of those, you can get away with using your dad’s work lights.

Those are just the must-haves when we head out on a shoot. If all you have is a mobile phone and a cassette recorder to work with, focus on the idea and make it work for your setup.

I’ll be back with a note on our post-production gear and software soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions about how we did something or want to know what it was like to write this on an iPhone 4 retina display, email me at gary@churchonthemove.com.