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Anyone able to give me any tips on a good camera setup for recording piano? Doesn't have to be epic, just a better quality than my iphone is getting sitting at the end of my piano.

I see vids on YouTube that are shot from slightly beyond the shoulder and I have no idea what they are using. I'm rather useless with technology at the best of times haha.

Hi Beth,

There were a couple of threads in the Adult Beginners Forum a few days ago which may help:

https://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubb...video%20yourself%20play.html#Post2158235

Thankyou! I had no idea those adapter thingies even existed.

Hi Beth.

In my opionion the best solution (that I adopt for my recordings) is buy an inexpensive camera (like your Iphone camera) but record the sound with a good commercial microphone.

For less of 100usd you'll find the Jammin HR5 or the better Zoom series.

For joining audio and video I suggest you Virtual Dub (opensource).

http://www.tutorialsroom.com/tutorials/details/vdub_adjust_sync.html

If you have any throuble to convert different audio video format, you could use the easy and user friendly ATUBE catcher (opensource).

Keep me informed for any doubt.

E.

Beth,

I strongly second Foster12's advice. There's an app for iPhone that called Filmic Pro. Add that into the mix and you've pretty much got everything you need. To step higher up the ladder is just a question of bells and whistles. There are ALWAYS more bells and whistles. I'm wrestling with some of them now

I am a big fan of the Zoom Q3HD. Affordable, practically foolproof, and easy to use and upload videos. You will get better sound doing it some of these other ways, but editing the audio + video is an extra step that I am happy to do without.

Whoa whoa whoa, that sounds scary to my tech novice head! What's the deal in layman's terms? Do you just plug the mic into the...well, which part of the iphone, and then...what happens next? Does it take a lot of time to use/get onto a computer once it's set up?

That's why I think the Zoom Q3 is a good option for you, Beth. It is a self-contained unit, independent of your phone. It has stereo microphones, so the sound quality is quite good. The HD version is high definition (obviously), so the picture quality is also pretty good. Transferring it to your computer is simply a matter of plugging the USB plug (attached to the Q3HD) to your computer and proceeding from there. The software bundled with the Zoom lets you do minor editing stuff (mostly just trimming the beginning and end off the clips), but that's usually all you need.

http://www.samsontech.com/zoom/products/handheld-video-recorders/q3hd/

Is that what you use for your YouTube vids Monica? I've just taken a look at it and it's in a price range I could just manage, and looks easy to use.

Yup. I started off with the Zoom Q3 (no high definition) but my videos from the past couple of years have been with the Q3HD. I am not very computer savvy, and I found the Q3 to be quite easy to use. The trickiest part is figuring out what gain setting to use with your setup, and that's something that is totally dependent on the room environment and piano, so you just have to experiment with the various settings. In my room with my piano, I ended up concluding that "low" was too quiet and "high" led to too much clipping. So I use it on "auto gain," and I set the low cut filter to on. But your optimal setup might be different.

I use the Zoom H2 constantly and get very good results. Based on that, if I were doing much video at all I'd definitely consider the Q3. I think the actual microphone is the same in both.

I think your best bet will be recording the video and audio track separately, since people now get used to the low noise floor and a clean sound.

I've done this quite often and the post-processing work isn't as bad as I initially thought.

When buying those low definition devices beware of their audio compression codec. Some low def format only support MP3 codec at a pretty low bitrate.