<p>In my opinion, professional prescreens have no advantage over a good self produced recording. In fact the professional videos can often look and sound too produced taking away the personality and realness of the student who is auditioning. iPads and iPhones are fine as cameras as long as the lighting is good. In fact with any camera, lighting makes a huge difference. If you are having issues with lighting, you can buy a few construction can lights at Home Depot for less than $10 a piece and use them to add light to a room. </p>
<p>The absolute best camera for making videos is a DSLR with HD capabilities. You just can’t beat the image of those cameras. If you have access to a Mac or iPad, the iMovie editing software is sufficient. If you have a PC, Movie Maker should also be more than enough. If you want additional capabilities, look for Adobe Premiere Elements 11 or 12. You can find the software for as low as $49.99 and its a program that your child will be able to use for many years to come (the pro version operates the same but has additional high end plugins). In fact if they learn to use it well, they can develop a marketable skill that could earn them extra money on the side.</p>
<p>When you are trying to decide where to place the camera, your number one concern should be capturing the sound. You need to find the “critical distance” which is the location at which the balance of the direct sound from the singer and the reverberant sound (the sound bouncing around the room, off the walls, etc.) are both equal. To do this, lay out a 25 ft tape measure on the floor. Starting at about 6ft, have your student sustain an /a/ vowel in the upper-middle part of their range at around volume 7-8 out of 10 (their loudest). They should breathe as needed, but otherwise maintain the same volume and pitch. Stand at 6 ft, start an audio or video recording and wait at the 6 ft mark for about 5 seconds, then move back 4 ft, speak “10 ft,” them move back four ft, speak “14 ft,” and repeat the process all the way to the end of the tape measure. When you are done, stop the recording and listen back through head phones or speakers. You will hear the sound change as you move backwards. Up close it will be bright and clear. It will get warmer to a certain point, then it will get really hollow sounding and you will lose the clarity of the voice. You want a place in the middle where there is a balance of warmth from the room and the clarity of the voice. This is why you usually stand around 10-15 ft from the audition table, the auditors want to hear your voice balanced in the room. </p>
<p>Once you have found the “spot” set your camera up there. If you cannot get a good video shot from that location, you may want to consider taping video and audio separately. To do this, place the video camera wherever you want it and a separate audio recorder at the critical distance. Start both the audio and the video recordings at the same time, clap your hands loudly three times, wait two seconds, and then do the audition. Then import the audio and video recordings into the video editing software. When you import the video, it will also have an audio track attached to it. In most video editing programs you will be able to see audio “graphs” for both the video camera audio and the separately recorded audio track (on a Mac you can use GarageBand for this step). You will then see three spikes on each audio track from the three claps. Line the three spikes from the audio recording with the thre spikes from the video recording. Now your audio tracks will be synced. You can then mute the camera audio and you should have beautiful video combined with great audio. </p>
<p>Hope this helps! If the forum would allow, I would be willing to create a video tutorial, but I don’t know that they allow you to share those on here.</p>
<p>~VT </p>