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I also felt like the article hit pretty weak in a lot of places. In the part where they compare Bill Gates to the Bloomberg anchor, it just says "Her self-pres

I also felt like the article hit pretty weak in a lot of places. In the part where they compare Bill Gates to the Bloomberg anchor, it just says "Her self-presentation is overawed by Gates’ setup." with no clear explanation as to why. And it's not actually clear to me when I look at the pic. Maybe I just don't have the "technical expertise to understand how colour temperature, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO conspire together to form a beautiful picture".

sokoloff 5y ago
I suspect they could have found a better example, but Gates was clearly using a camera with a very wide aperture, giving a shallow depth of (focused) field, meaning his background wasn’t distracting. His lighting also had slightly less hot-spotting (you can see she’s using two main lights, but can’t readily ID Gates’ light placement). Given the disastrous video setups I’ve seen, I think the Bloomberg anchor’s setup was at least a 7 on the 10 scale (and maybe an 8), so hardly terrible. Side note: audio is a fraction of the effort and expense and IMO is more important.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  If you mean to really REALLY push the quality, audio gets expensive. My video is in service of audio plugins so I have a motivation to do that: the reason my audio is strikingly good on my voice is, it is NOT done with plugins. It's done with a Roswell Colares (or a Sennheiser lav) a $1500 boutique mic inspired by $10,000 mics, into an API 3124 studio pre, directly into a MOTU 16A interface with no further processing. Room treatment also plays a part: the room has two large openings into other spaces and six large T-Fusor diffusors, painted to match the walls. A setup like that projects its sound character into the recording so strongly that there's nothing to fix: when the mics and things are high enough quality it's like the intention of the vocal performance comes through more powerfully in the first place, and this responds very well to digitization and compression.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Sure, getting to the 99.99th percentile of audio is incredibly expensive [just like anything else]. My comments were more directed at getting people into the 80th percentile level (decent mic on a boom, correctly placed and away from a built-in camera/laptop mic), but your point is correct for the absolute best 1-in-10000 level.
jessaustin 5y ago
The anchor is a beautiful young woman, and Gates is a crusty old man. Humans would naturally be more inclined to look at the anchor, but she looks like she's live from a badger-hole (possibly the badger also did her makeup?) while Gates appears to have floated halfway down from heaven on a fluffy white cloud. De gustibus!
Applejinx 5y ago
Bill's setup wouldn't be perfect for everybody but it's very intentional and well adjusted for his needs. He's using a good camera and a lens with a wide aperture to blur out the background (possibly even with ND filters to allow the wide aperture with brighter lighting). The bokeh is quite good on his blurry background: it's not meant to be just a gaussian blur, bokeh has edges (especially on point light sources) but in a nice way. It's definitely a real camera he's using with a proper lens. The anchor's hair is blending with her bookcase, color-wise. It's not the best possible background, there's too much sharp detail and contrast behind her (by contrast Gates is apparently in Heaven). She's got two points of light, one a larger area (you can see the reflections in her eyes) but Gates seems to have larger area lights, entirely to the sides. Maybe, maybe a light nearer the camera, but it's not very intense. Maybe just white area in front of him to bounce light. You can see reflections off the SIDE of his glasses, but there are no bright reflections IN his glasses and this is probably why he chose the way he did. He loses out on being able to have 'anime highlights' in his eyes for appeal, but he looks younger through the lighting covering him from all sides, hiding detail. When I stream or make videos, I push pretty hard to get useful effects out of the situation, and I go for a big flashy anime highlight reflected in my eyes. You can use an area light, like a tent, but those have to be HUGE to really push the highlight size and cover a broad area: like, several feet wide and right up next to you. Instead of that, I've been using a ring light and aiming the camera through it, using a slightly longer lens (and wide aperture, and modular synth for bokeh-ed out blinky lights in the background, and Hypno video generator to do stuff in the black areas of the shot, etc etc etc) It's pretty hilarious how close the ring light has to be, to take up any space in the image reflected off your eyeball. You're almost sticking your head through the ring light. All that matters is how the shot looks: viewers can't see all the crazy lighting that you're looking at. There's a competitive aspect to it. If I can beat Bill Gates's quality level, I'll feel I did a good job. I will not beat Ricky Tinez, no matter what I do :)

sokoloff 5y ago

I suspect they could have found a better example, but Gates was clearly using a camera with a very wide aperture, giving a shallow depth of (focused) field, meaning his background wasn’t distracting. His lighting also had slightly less hot-spotting (you can see she’s using two main lights, but can’t readily ID Gates’ light placement). Given the disastrous video setups I’ve seen, I think the Bloomberg anchor’s setup was at least a 7 on the 10 scale (and maybe an 8), so hardly terrible. Side note: audio is a fraction of the effort and expense and IMO is more important.

Applejinx 5y ago
If you mean to really REALLY push the quality, audio gets expensive. My video is in service of audio plugins so I have a motivation to do that: the reason my audio is strikingly good on my voice is, it is NOT done with plugins. It's done with a Roswell Colares (or a Sennheiser lav) a $1500 boutique mic inspired by $10,000 mics, into an API 3124 studio pre, directly into a MOTU 16A interface with no further processing. Room treatment also plays a part: the room has two large openings into other spaces and six large T-Fusor diffusors, painted to match the walls. A setup like that projects its sound character into the recording so strongly that there's nothing to fix: when the mics and things are high enough quality it's like the intention of the vocal performance comes through more powerfully in the first place, and this responds very well to digitization and compression.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Sure, getting to the 99.99th percentile of audio is incredibly expensive [just like anything else]. My comments were more directed at getting people into the 80th percentile level (decent mic on a boom, correctly placed and away from a built-in camera/laptop mic), but your point is correct for the absolute best 1-in-10000 level.

jessaustin 5y ago

The anchor is a beautiful young woman, and Gates is a crusty old man. Humans would naturally be more inclined to look at the anchor, but she looks like she's live from a badger-hole (possibly the badger also did her makeup?) while Gates appears to have floated halfway down from heaven on a fluffy white cloud. De gustibus!

Applejinx 5y ago

Bill's setup wouldn't be perfect for everybody but it's very intentional and well adjusted for his needs. He's using a good camera and a lens with a wide aperture to blur out the background (possibly even with ND filters to allow the wide aperture with brighter lighting). The bokeh is quite good on his blurry background: it's not meant to be just a gaussian blur, bokeh has edges (especially on point light sources) but in a nice way. It's definitely a real camera he's using with a proper lens. The anchor's hair is blending with her bookcase, color-wise. It's not the best possible background, there's too much sharp detail and contrast behind her (by contrast Gates is apparently in Heaven). She's got two points of light, one a larger area (you can see the reflections in her eyes) but Gates seems to have larger area lights, entirely to the sides. Maybe, maybe a light nearer the camera, but it's not very intense. Maybe just white area in front of him to bounce light. You can see reflections off the SIDE of his glasses, but there are no bright reflections IN his glasses and this is probably why he chose the way he did. He loses out on being able to have 'anime highlights' in his eyes for appeal, but he looks younger through the lighting covering him from all sides, hiding detail. When I stream or make videos, I push pretty hard to get useful effects out of the situation, and I go for a big flashy anime highlight reflected in my eyes. You can use an area light, like a tent, but those have to be HUGE to really push the highlight size and cover a broad area: like, several feet wide and right up next to you. Instead of that, I've been using a ring light and aiming the camera through it, using a slightly longer lens (and wide aperture, and modular synth for bokeh-ed out blinky lights in the background, and Hypno video generator to do stuff in the black areas of the shot, etc etc etc) It's pretty hilarious how close the ring light has to be, to take up any space in the image reflected off your eyeball. You're almost sticking your head through the ring light. All that matters is how the shot looks: viewers can't see all the crazy lighting that you're looking at. There's a competitive aspect to it. If I can beat Bill Gates's quality level, I'll feel I did a good job. I will not beat Ricky Tinez, no matter what I do :)