Starting Media Team Videography

Technical Videography and Photography
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I’m interested in expanding our Media team to include some videography, mostly @ events but some from our workspace and other internal team things like outreach as well. It definitely seems doable but I’m curious finding somewhere to start. We have one person who does FPV as a hobby and me who has the fundamentals of premiere down and a few people interested/willing to learn filming. After a little research it seems like one or two of the DJI Pocket 2s would be a good fit for our team, does anyone use that?

What is your team’s gear/setup?
What are the things you always record?
What do y’all do with footage?
How many people are involved per meeting with it?

Thanks!

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straight up, our team just uses cellphones. We dont have the best video but its half decent and phone cameras are getting shockingly good. Sometimes if im not driving (rare) i grab my DSLR and film robots. We put all our footage in a google photos album for everyone to see, including parents and sponsors, and we try to make it a point to take photos all throughout build season of people working, prototype videos, and just random B-Roll footage. I use shotcut, a free video editing software to edit clips and use some basic filters. We had an action camera on the robot which provided some pretty cool shots too. Here is the video i did this year: FRC Team 5454 Season Recap 2023 - YouTube

My opinion: Gear doesnt make the photographer or videographer as much as experience does. Gear helps, but what you really need to do is just get experience. Grab a camera and go video stuff. It will feel awkward, but eventually it will just click. Get outside and film bikers, cars, birds, whatever. Go to an FRC event and film from the bleachers. Theres so many things you can do, just get out and get the experience then find what you need to improve your quality.

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Thank you for this. Do Y’all use anything for a Microphone or Gimbal?

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I’ll also give you a friendly reminder that drones are on the banned-items list at events; nothing says you can’t use them for doing video at your shop or demos or wherever (though I would also check local restrictions/FAA), but at events you’ll need to stick with a non-drone camera.

I might also consider a GoPro or similar for on-robot footage; it can be pretty cool but needs some thought as to placement.

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I personally have a gimbal for my gopro hero 3+ but i dont use it that often as its pretty wide angle. With the gopro gimbal i cant really film events that well because It requires pretty fast movements when you are filming a robot. Usually in my videos audio is muted but, but if i do record audio i have a shotgun microphone that records into an iphone.

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I come from a team with a pretty big media team and lots of budget for it, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.

Disclaimer over,
We have 2 team owned DJI Osmo 2s for Video and a Nikon Z50 for Stills, along with a team members Gopro we put in the pit for time lapse footage. In addition we have around 5 personal cameras + whatever pictures we take on phones. We use drones maybe 2 times a year, in order to get drone shots of our school for the recap video of the events we host

We have a list of things that we want to record at comp, and it changes slightly from event to event, sometimes we want to capture every team at an event (normally just for events we host), and other times we just want to focus on our team. For DCMP, we want shots of the pit, the robot, drive team, and cheering, and there’s always random dancing, shenanigans, or our reactions to winning awards that are more time sensitive but important to capture then and there.

We store our footage mirrored on a set of portable hard drives, because we often have 100+ GB of footage after a event to ingest. Its often one persons full time job to sit in the stands and have a laptop to collect all the footage we make. After that we give the event footage to one person to edit into a recap, and we normally use premiere to make our recaps.

We have about 10-15 or so people working on media things a meeting, and maybe 5-10 show up when we are taping a project, like our impact video. other than the cameraperson, we’ll have a person holding a laptop with the script, and a person working lights, and lastly maybe an audio person too, plus a mentor.

Shameless plug for our youtube channel Robototes - YouTube

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This rocks! You Rock! Thanks

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Hi, I’m Tessel and I am the Media & Branding lead of Team Rembrandts, 4481. As a lead I take care of most of the content that we make, videos and social media specifically. For our socials we post 3 times a week. So I have quite some experience and I’d love to help you!

I will talk below about what kind of videos we make, what sort of equipment and how we organize our department. If anything is not clear, send us an dm on Instagram! I’ll be happy to explain anything.

Our instagram to give you an idea of our content and branding: https://instagram.com/teamrembrandts?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

And maybe you would like to check out our build thread for a deeper dive into our departement:

recap videos
During buildseason and competitions we make weekly or daily recap videos. These are recorded at events and our build shop, like you would like to do too. For these videos we use 2-3 different kinds of personal cameras (canon 80/ canon mark II). Often we also record small footage with our phones since it is easier when prototyping.

For short or small recap videos we don’t really use any audio or lighting equipment, maybe sometimes a simple pointer microphone to get some decent audio which we can use during the video. (Example recap video where we sometimes led the audio of the clip come forward :
Team Rembrandts 4481 on Instagram: "Making this video was yet one of the most difficult things EVER!!! Capturing the regional feeling and our accomplishments is always hard, but capturing THIS in a video was almost impossible. Watching our reactions of winning Dean’s list Finalist, Regional Winner and winning Impact award brought me close to tears so many times while making this. And just by simply looking at our reactions, it shows how hard people worked for it and how we’ll deserved it is. While making these videos you get to see more than just your own eyes. I see how hard everyone worked during buildseason and competition. I mean it when I say that I am more than proud of this team! What we did this season so far is absolutely incredible and for me, it’s the best season I ever had yet! I could not have wished for any better and… let’s kick some more ass on worlds🦁🧡 #makeitloud #firstpost #FIRSTinspires #omgrobots #robotics #teamrembrandts #4481 #youthinspiringyouth #youthinspireyouth #YIY #wijzijnfontys #CHARGEDUP #TeamREV #FIRSTEnergize #shorts")

We do use handheld microphones when we want to record an interview or for when we showed our pit. This is a wireless microphone.
( PIT: https://youtu.be/ym2OzwbeB_Y )

During events and regionals we don’t have a specific list wrote down, but I’m a big fan of showing the technical and non-technical side or our team, so I make sure to film the pit-crew, the drive team and the robot, the people talking in the pit and cheering in the stands and even our lunch breaks. All this to give a proper overview of our team during competition. And it’s always nice to film too much than not have any footage at all.

Review/ impact videos
Since in your message you did not mention wanting to make these type of videos, I will keep it short.

The quality of your audio is of great importance. For the past year, our team has started recording master classes and REV review videos, but also for our impact video the audio had to be great.

Now, setting up a review video is a little but more difficult than any other normal prototype or event video. Since we want to give these videos a more professional look. For these videos we have two lamps owned by the team. Further we use wireless pin on microphones for a clear and good audio.

For review videos it is nice for the eye to switch from camera position, so we often record these with one standing camera and on handheld.
(example: Team Rembrandts 4481 on Instagram )

Our media department is quite small in persons. We have about 2-3 active members of which I am the lead, one is the video archiver one is someone who mainly does software but likes to help us out. With a great planning and preparation you can come a long way!

content calender
For explanation of the content calender, please see our build thread!

FRC 4481 Team Rembrandts 2023 Build Thread - #56 by Sandwich21

storage
All of our videos are stored on hard drives. We empty our cameras after every event day or buildseason day to make sure there is always room to record.

editing
After the footage of the video is garhered, it goes to one person who will edit the video. We always use premier pro and it is highly recommended.

Our YouTube channel:

Tips:

  • if you use different cameras, make sure to make the settings the same! This will save a lot of time colour correcting in post.
  • LIGHTING IS IMPORTANT! A good lighted room gives better footage than when it is dark and you have to put your ISO higher. Putting the ISO higher will often make I more grainy and this will give a bad quality of the video. So if you can, light it up!
  • colour grading/ correcting can make your shots more fit together and give your video nicer look!
  • ALWAYS take spare batteries with you during events! You never know how much you might need it.

Tips for social media

  • MAKE A CONTENT CALENDER! This will improve posting on time and keep a clear schedule and overview of your posts. See our build thread for our content calender!
  • start on time with making posts, I try to finish everything 1 day before it gets posted, so other members can give feedback.
  • creating a structure in your posts is highly recommended. With this I mean, post for example the same sort or post every week. During pre-season we posted a team member post every week. This also gives a nice and clean look on your social media!
  • engage online! Tag partners or other teams when you mention them and use hashtags!
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I noticed you mentioned using some lighting fixtures and pin-on wireless microphones for your videos. Do you have any suggestions or lessons learned on equipment? Im looking into buying some for our team but was curious if you have a specific product that works well for you or not.

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I’m new to this thread but in my experience audio equipment is quite hard to get right on a low budget. If you’re looking to spend less than 250 bucks i’d say don’t even bother looking at wireless systems (many of the cheaper wireless units are a bait imo and you’ll end up with spotty and inconsistent transmission).

If you DO have the budget, the DJI wireless system or the Hollyland Lark Max are both great systems. Otherwise, Movo makes a pretty good budget shotgun microphone and you can buy a cheap lavalier mic from
basically any manufacturer.

As for lighting fixtures, your success will mainly depend on your skill. The only thing to look out for is what’s known as a “CRI Index” which basically states how color accurate the lights will be. You’ll generally want to aim for CRI 95 and never dip below CRI 90.

My recommendation is to buy 2 soft boxes or LED panel lights and an accent light that’s colored.

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Okay replying to the larger thread now.

I was the Director of Media with 2976 for 3 years, and we developed an extremely fast workflow for our recaps in the 2022 season that allows for about a 1-week turnaround on any production.

For equipment, I recommend using the largest sensor you can get your hands on. We ran a Canon EOS R on either a DJI Ronin SC or RS3, but even a iPhone will get pretty good results. You mentioned DJI Pocket 2s - I highly recommend against them. They have sensors that are extremely small (making for pretty noisy footage) and barely weigh anything, so the onboard gimbal is essentially useless since you can’t actually hold the thing still. I would seriously just run phones over the Pocket 2. If you’re able, however, we’d definitely recommend something with an interchangeable lens system, preferably mirrorless. You’ll see a huge jump in video quality and you’ll then be able to rig your cameras up with V-mount batteries if you’d like for all-day battery life. With a DSLR/Mirrorless unit, you’ll also be able to run the larger DJI gimbals that provide good stability as well as a lot of mass so you won’t have the signature “jitter” that you see when recording on lighter cameras.

At competitions, we usually ran 2 cameras, both shooting in C-LOG and identical white balance. One of them would also serve as our photo camera, taking pictures of matches and other random team activities. The main camera would be used to film every single match our team played in, as well as B-roll during breaks and in between matches. We also experimented with B-roll collection during load-in at one point, but it didn’t really pan out and we don’t recommend doing it (pit admin will probably kick you out because “you’re already done with load in”).

The above video is our 2022 Houston recap breakdown, with a lot more info about what we shoot and how we shoot it, as well as our post-production practices. We’re trying to get some more Proguies out later this summer as well.

With footage, we typically store redundantly, with a local copy on my PC and the rest staying on the SD cards until the project is over. Once there’s no more critical need for the files, we can delete them off of the camera SD cards so they’re ready for the next project.

Post-production starts as soon as the competition is over, and it’s always 1 editor for consistency and convenience. That editor was me for the last 3 years, but now that I’ve graduated, there’s a couple of new editors that may try to do some kind of rotation.

Media doesn’t really meet at meetings for us since almost everything we do is digital. There are sometimes meetings when we’ll ask media to show up, such as the Roboti Reveal tech days, but for the most part media is free to show up to meetings optionally as long as they’re providing deliverables on time.

Hope this post helped, I’m happy to answer any other questions if you have them!

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I’ve never commented on CD before, so please forgive any formatting/forum mannerism faux pas I may or may not make.

My name is Cole, and I’ve been in charge of making media for FRC team 4392, The Deceivers for a few years. For the past two years we have made weekly vlog-style recaps of build and competition season (kickoff through worlds). Prior to that, we made more typical single season recap & reveal-styled videos.

I will do my best to answer your questions:

1) Gear: I use a Canon EOS R mirror-less camera, with a Canon EF mount-adapted 17-35mm f/2.8 interchangeable lens. But before that I used cheaper Canon 70D DSLR with the stock EF-S 18-55mm lens it came with. And before that I used my phone.

I’m not the first person to make this statement, but the best camera/gear will always be the equipment you have at your disposal.

I don’t use a gimbal. I don’t keep a lenscap on my camera. I use the on-board microphone. I don’t shoot 4K. When my camera isn’t in my hands, it’s in a simple shoulder bag I always wear. For me, these things are just barriers to getting what matters: footage. I see the camera as a tool. It wont matter how smooth the footage would’ve been if you miss the action because you were setting up a gimbal/forgot to charge it/etc. What matters are the feelings, the emotion: moments in time that would be lost forever if not recorded. If they are gone, it doesn’t matter what resolution they would’ve been in.

2) What to record: I record a lot. During build season I record much of each meeting. At competition, I record each match, and a lot of the in between. Like I mentioned before, our videos are vlog-styled content. This means a lot of it are funny anecdotes and conversations I have with the kids and mentors on the team. The important thing is to record things happening. Whether it’s a match, a bolt being tightened, people talking: nobody wants to watch a video of nothing.

When assembling the video, before putting a clip into the video I ask myself two questions:

a) does this clip push the narrative forward? or
b) is this clip funny?

If one or both of these things are true, usually the clip goes into the video. If neither of them are true, it does not. For the style of videos we make, it is best when both of these things are true.

While it’s relatively easy to understand if something is funny, it is harder to determine if something is pushing forward the narrative of the video. This is something in my head, and I’m unsure how to describe it. It would ultimately be the video editor/team’s discretion/creativity that decides this.

3) What to do with footage? I mentioned earlier that I don’t shoot 4K. I shoot 1080p60fps instead. This is for two reasons:

a) 4K video is generally harder for the camera to encode and takes more time, and
b) 4K video takes up a lot of space.

Each year I shoot roughly 1TB of footage, covering the whole season. This is just myself with one camera, so I imagine operations with multiple crews/cameras would be even more. And this is just 1080p60. 4K would be, well, ~4X that.

I record the videos onto a basic 64GB SD card, and swap it out with a blank when the first one fills up. I don’t generally fill both cards in one day, so back at the my house/the hotel I will copy both SD cards over to an portable SSD, and make a cloud-based backup. It is from the SSD that I edit the videos.

4) How many people? Right now, it is mostly just me. This will change in 2024. I have been doing this by myself for too long, and while I certainly enjoy it, it is time for more people to be involved. More specifically, I want a larger team working on non weekly-recap styled videos, as well as more shortform content for both YouTube and TikTok.

Other info

I have been using Premiere Pro for a few years, and I really like it. But I don’t like Adobe, and we will be pivoting to DaVinci Resolve for video editing this coming year. It is a free alternative to Premiere with much of the same professional-power. It has become more popular in the past few years, and I anticipate could be just as useful a skill in the future as knowing Premiere.

I hope this was of some help to someone. After doing this for years, I think the best advice I could give would be to just go for it. Be unique. There’s certainly a style that exists among FRC videos, and while there’s nothing wrong with conforming to the status quo sometimes (“imitation” can certainly be a good way to learn); innovation happens when you try something new. Just because everyone else is doing something one way does not mean you have to.

Ultimately, the best video you can make is the best video you can make, with the equipment you can use. A video is better than no video. And there’s only one way to get better: doing.

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For our videos we use different kind of lightning and pin-up microphones, I’ll shortly talk about them below.

Lightning
Up until a year ago, we did not use any extra lightning equipment. For a good video, good lighting is recommended. It can make the image more sharp and less grainy. Normally, we would just find a bright room or fix it in post. But since our content started to grow, we got two extra lights from the team. I’ll put the links down below. These lights really helped our content look more professional and also motivated me personally more to work on our content.

Lights: 2x

Stative: 1x

Softbox: 2x

This composition ensures a wide functionality so that we can use these lamps for any situation. And with a total price of 613 euros, this is a good price-quality-functionality ratio.

Camera’s
So, our team owns a GoPro Hero 5 and borrows the other camera from team members. The GoPro we use to mount on the robot or put up our 6 week long live stream during buildseason. It’s just a nice extra gadget that we often use.

The camera that we mainly use is the canon 80D with a 15-85mm lens. I really like this camera since it has a good stabiliser in it and is really easy to work with (with a little explanation). It has a 64GB sd card in it and normally we put it up on a stative/ stand. Further we also often get to borrow a canon mark II. This camera is very big and heavy and a little less easier to work with, but it does shoot some great footage!

GoPro Hero 5:

Canon 80D:

Audio
For our audio equipment we have different kinds of microphones. For catching background noise and ambiance we normally use a pointer microphone (I’ll add images down below). This is not very clear audio, if you’re looking to record one person. But it is nice to use in videos to add an extra level of depth in audio.

For interviews and review videos we have two bluetooth microphones and one wired microphone. We prefer using the two bluetooth ones, since it is easier to work with. But when three persons are in the video, we use two bluetooth and one wired. For me personally, the bluetooth are easier to work with, but using the wired one is also no problem. We have about 1,5M-2M wired cable so the person talking can Stan far away from the camera. Recently we switched to a different pair of bluetooth microphones, since these were and still are also borrowed from team members.

The microphones that we use currently:
I’ll check tonight for the exact information, can’t find them now.

I’ll add a small how-to-interview paper that I made recently. This was for my new M&B student since we’re recording some interview videos now and I wanted her to get on track as soon as possible. And one on brand design. Disclaimer: I made these very short and simple so they just contain the basics!

HOW-TO-INTERVIEW.pdf (1.7 MB)
HOW-TO-branddesign2 (1).pdf (1.1 MB) (On the second page of this I showed how I use the design tips to make my design more simple and clear, sorry this is in Dutch!)

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BIG VOUCH for 60fps. We also opt for 1080p@60 over 4K@30 on our EOS R (partially also because of the nasty crop) so that we can slow things down in post for an added level of stability.

When we film with our R5C, though, we’re able to get 4K@60 but everything is produced on a 1080p timeline anyway so the extra resolution is just for reframing purposes and to hopefully get a nicer downsampled 1080p feed (see Robot Reveal 2023 Whitepaper.pdf for more on our production specs and why we run 1080p timelines).

All in all I always recommend dropping down in resolution in exchange for higher format, down to a minimum of 720p (although situationally 1080p@30 is more useful than 720p@60).

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Don’t overlook the power of the cell phone camera that is already in everybody’s hands. Or put another way, the mediocre camera you are holding is way more valuable than the fancy one that is tucked away in its case somewhere.

Ask everybody on the team to take video or pictures whenever there is something noteworthy going on, and have someplace for them to be shared. And have somebody (or multiple somebodies) go through it on a regular basis to bookmark the highlights so you don’t have terabytes to sort out at the end of the season.

Good video editing software isn’t too expensive, but if you don’t mind a little aggravation you can make basic videos with whatever editing software is bundled with your OS. (I have the mental scars to prove it.)

By all means, don’t skimp on good equipment or software if you have the budget, but don’t be afraid to leverage the resources you already have.

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Hey!

Yesterday our team uploaded another Open Alliance update!
This one is talking about our Media & Branding sub-department. It’s worth a read if you are interested in starting or expanding your Media & Branding. The post mainly talks about how exactly we regulate and manage our media & branding and how we handle projects with one of our latest video series as an example.

And know that if you ever have any branding-related questions you can send us a message on our social media! @teamrembrandts

Link to the ChiefDelphi post:

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Well as media REP I have 3 cameras (they are my personal ones) I shoot on nikon d5000 , d5300, and Canon d5 mark 3
Other equipment
VILTROX DC-550 Touch Screen DSLR Camera Field Monitor 140$ x2 of these
DJI Ronin-SC - Camera Stabilizer, 3-Axis Handheld Gimbal 280$ x3 of these
thats all you need plus a good editing pc I use canva, and Divnici resolve

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