Outtakes: day one

I set out to film the first real segment for the channel. I got about 45 seconds I can use. Here is most of the rest of it.

A few things I learned, in the order I learned them:

Placement is the gain control. I spent a long time turning a knob on the recorder trying to stop the microphone clipping, and the knob was never the problem. Moving the lavalier down one shirt button did more than the entire range of the gain control. Second button clips, third button sits at a comfortable level with a better noise floor. It was mechanical the whole time.

Read the meter, not the story you have in your head. Most of that night came from measuring something while it was already at full scale, deciding the control was broken, and confidently building on that. If a control moves the noise floor but never the peaks, the signal is clipping and the measurement is worthless.

A teleprompter in the wrong place is worse than none. Mine was on the arm of a chair, down and to my left, so every good take has me reading at the floor. The fix is not a better script, it is putting the screen directly under the lens.

Talking to a camera is a skill, and I have never worked on it. That sounds obvious written down. It did not feel obvious at eleven at night on take fifty-three million.

The rig works now and every setting is written down. Next time the words are the only variable.