Lesson Description
Planning the Room
7m 7s
Before you open the software, make sure you’ve thought about your room’s layout.
Transcript
Planning the Room
7m 7s
00:06
Hello, welcome!
00:08
We are going to be doing ACPR training today.
00:11
That is Automatic Camera Preset Recall,
00:14
our plug-in that is used to automatically direct cameras to point to the current speaker in a room.
00:22
If you are familiar with this already, then you're in the right place.
00:25
If you have no idea what ACPR is,
00:28
then maybe go and take a look at a couple of the opening tutorial videos
00:32
just to orient yourself about what we're doing in a room.
00:36
Because we're going to dive right into getting the plugin,
00:40
how to wire it in your system.
00:41
We're going to touch every single button inside the plugin's control panel,
00:46
and then we're going to take you through a real installation,
00:49
how to configure it, how to set up your zones.
00:52
It's going to take a while, so sit back, relax.
00:57
You know you've got to make sure you do all the right steps.
00:59
It isn't that complicated, but you do have to do everything in the right order.
01:03
It's kind of like making a sandwich.
01:05
If you make the sandwich in the wrong order, it's not a sandwich, is it?
01:10
No. But is making a sandwich that hard?
01:13
No, it isn't. You just have to learn how to do it.
01:15
So we're learning how to do it today.
01:17
Alright, first of all, if you don't have the plugin,
01:21
be sure to download it.
01:22
You can download it from the asset manager.
01:25
I'm going to go ahead and type in here. I'm just going to type in "camera."
01:28
That way, it's going to filter this by all of the plugins that have the word "camera" in there.
01:32
And then you can just install it right there.
01:34
So install it now, follow along with me.
01:36
Open up the designer software as I go through things.
01:39
Make sure that you're doing it in the software as well.
01:41
So the first thing you want to do before you build
01:44
anything is make sure you know what you're doing in the room.
01:48
Don't dive into the software and assume that you're going to build it on the fly.
01:53
Take the time to understand the room.
01:58
Where are the displays in the room?
02:01
Where is the microphone in the room?
02:03
Are you using a ceiling-based microphone?
02:05
Are you using desktop microphones?
02:09
Are you using individual microphones on podiums or things like that?
02:12
Where are the camera positions going to be?
02:16
How many shots do you want to set up?
02:19
Do that first. I don't care if it's on a napkin.
02:23
Get a pencil and a napkin, sketch it out.
02:26
Whatever it is, you want a plan before you go in.
02:31
Or else, you'll see later reorienting this on the
02:34
fly is going to make things a little bit more complicated.
02:37
Make sure you understand that room.
02:38
For the room that we're going to design,
02:40
we're going to just take a room,
02:43
a long conference table style of room.
02:46
At the far end of the conference table, we are going to have the display.
02:50
And on both sides of that display will be one of our camera positions
02:53
so that the camera on the left side can see everyone on the right side of the conference room.
02:58
The cameras on the right side can see everyone on the left side of the conference.
03:02
We're going to have one camera in the very
03:04
front that's aimed for a wide shot at the conference table,
03:07
and then another camera in the back to get a shot of anyone who's near the front of the room.
03:12
So that's our napkin sketch of what our room is going to be.
03:16
Every single room is different.
03:18
I mean, not every single room.
03:19
A lot of them are kind of similar, but in general,
03:22
whatever you're designing for is going to be specific to you.
03:24
You might have a U-shaped desk.
03:27
You may have a V-fly.
03:29
Whatever it is that you're setting up for, sketch it out.
03:32
Do that work now, and then think about what the camera shots are going to be,
03:38
what areas of that room you want to cover with each of your cameras.
03:42
You don't want some people think they want this.
03:45
Some people think they want like every camera shot to cover one chair.
03:51
If someone's sitting here, I want one camera shot that just gets me and frames it really good.
03:56
I get why you think you want that, but I promise you don't really want that.
04:02
You're not Steven Spielberg, no offense.
04:05
You're not creating a movie here.
04:07
You don't need to cut into lots of really close tight shots.
04:10
We're trying to just cover a meeting, right?
04:14
And if you try too hard to get your camera shots really tight on someone,
04:18
then you're just setting yourself up for failure
04:21
because you're introducing the possibility that humans will do the things that humans do,
04:27
which is they're going to move their chair in the wrong place,
04:29
place, or they're going to lean forward,
04:31
or they're not going to be within the shot where you think they're going to be.
04:35
And now you've got different angles that aren't right.
04:39
You want to pull it out, want to pull it out a little bit.
04:41
It's okay to have two or three people in the shot in a tight meeting space.
04:46
That's what real life is like, right?
04:48
If you're in the room and you're looking around and you're looking at the people in the room,
04:52
guess what?
04:53
You're seeing two or three people wherever you look,
04:55
which is also good.
04:56
You're seeing people react, you're seeing them next to each other.
05:00
You're getting a better view of the entire space,
05:03
and that gives you the wiggle room for when people are moving their chairs around,
05:09
for when they're leaning over in the wrong place,
05:11
for maybe even if they're too tall or they're too short, whatever it is.
05:16
You want to widen it up a little bit.
05:18
Now we do have auto framing in the cameras,
05:20
and we'll talk about that a little bit later,
05:21
and that will actually help tighten up the shot.
05:23
But preliminarily, you want those shots nice and wide.
05:28
I promise trying to get it to a really tight individual person
05:33
is not going to dramatically increase the quality of the far-end user's experience.
05:37
It's better to keep them around two or three.
05:40
If you're doing something like an auditorium,
05:42
and you have some tight shots for the podium or the presenter,
05:46
but then you're cutting to the audience as well,
05:49
keeping it wide there is also a really good idea.
05:52
Let's say you've got a camera that's taking on the entirety of the audience.
05:56
You don't need to try to set up 20, 30 different possible locations
06:02
for where the camera could be cutting to everywhere in the audience.
06:05
It's not that important, right?
06:07
If someone's asking a question in the audience,
06:09
you don't need to super zoom in on them.
06:11
You just need a general shot in which that person will be covered.
06:15
A lot of people might take an auditorium camera and just cut it into quadrants.
06:19
You make sure that you've got a camera that's going to be aimed.
06:22
If someone's speaking in the top left area or the top right area,
06:26
you can choose those as your shots.
06:29
That way, you've got, you know, 10 to 15 people,
06:32
maybe more, in that shot. But it's okay.
06:36
You're getting a better experience for the far end because they're zooming in and seeing those areas.
06:41
If you try too hard to make too many shots within that audience,
06:46
you're wasting your time.
06:47
It takes a lot longer on your end on the install, and again,
06:50
it's just not increasing the quality of what that far end is getting as much as you think it is.
06:58
Those questions from the audience are generally going to be brief.
07:01
Once they're done, they're coming back to the good shots up on stage.