Awl--
I'm in the market now to make instructional-type dvds (f'sure not shop techniques .... more like pahmping-people-up type stuff....), as I am now sending out samples of my unit, which is pretty much useless without a fair amount of demonstration/background material.
Which proly in itself bodes for its failure, but wtf, ahm already broke...
Some people here are from educational institutions which likely do video stuff, some already post machining videos for the group, so I thought I'd get my first input here--even just to get pointed in the right direction. Hopefully some of this info/discussion will prove useful to others wanting to do similar stuff.
I've used camcorders on rare occasion, am vaguely familiar with the existence of some of the high-end editing packages (Pinnacle, Adobe Premier--saw demos at B&H Photo in Manhattan), but don't need anything high-end now. Any basic editing would do for now, hopefully handling multichannel input. Does something like MSPaint for videos exist within stock Windows? Anything else?
Rather than digital camcorders on tripods, are webcams high enough quality to shoot decent videos? The p*rn housewives are doing it, altho I don't know if quality is much of an issue there--in any context.
Next, many videos are shot from simultaneous multiple angles: front, left, right, and then back, left, right, ie, the 'multichannel" mentioned above--as are TV shows, sports events, with guys in a booth switching live from view to view, depending on what's going on in the field, for optimized viewing for the home viewer.
I would like to take the output from 6 webcams simultaneously into a laptop. Then, I would like to view these six "streams", and edit the best views into the final stream, as well as sound, mebbe a graphic or two, etc.
In essence, a laptop with a webcam (or 6), IS a camcorder, fwict--the webcam itself being the lense-digitized signal end, the lap top being the rest of a camcorder. Since I have the beginnings of a fixed studio, I really don't need the field portability of a formal camera.
Sound is also a very big issue in videos--surprisingly hard to achieve decent sound, so as not to sound like yer talking in a metal box. Boom mikes seem to be requisite, but mebbe there are other (and cheaper?) solutions now.
So how to begin? Does this seem like a viable strategy--"multichannel" filming via multiple webcams, then editing? Better ways to go? Idears?? Leads?