Low-budget Meetup recording tips

During pandemic, while organizing GDG Berlin (& later Berlindroid) Meetups, I learned a lot more about live streaming & video editing, from events such as DevFest DACH Online. And once we started hosting events IRL again, I started the habit of recording the talks. After a few failed attempts, here's what my setups are at the moment, and what mistakes I have made, so that you don't have to.

But what do they look like?

Here are a few more recent examples:

Are they gonna win any award? Absolutely not.

Equipements & Setup

Disclosure: The following section includes Amazon Affiliate Links.

Not counting the iPhone, the following costs around €200 for these accessories. And it should be quite easy to find something cheaper that works well enough.

• iPhone 11 Pro (256GB) (Amazon.de but just buy any newer iPhone, or the last 2 years of Android phone where the video becomes acceptable)
• Hollyland Lark M1 wireless microphone (Amazon.de). It's pretty damn good.
• Rollei C6i Tripod (Amazon.de). Not the best tripod for video work.
• Manfrotto PIXI Clamp (Amazon.de) to mount my phone to my tripod. Or just use Duct Tape 🤷
• Belkin 3.5 mm Audio + Charge RockStar (Amazon.de) or Apple Lightning to 3.5 headphone jack adapter (Amazon.de)

Clearly this is a single-camera setup, so that I don't have to figure out how to stitch multiple clips together, or match the color grading, or sit in front of the camera to pan to speaker whenever they started walking, etc. I just find a spot that the camera can see the screen, while not getting in the way of other people, that's it.

Lesson learned

I learned best by trial-and-error (thank god I am not a doctor), and here are those errors:

PWM LEDs & Projectors will make everything unusable

Unfortunately I don't have the original clips anymore, but they kinda look like this but 10x worse

Even with working audio it is not something I would like to entertain. And that leads to the next point and the backstory:

Your most expensive camera might not be your best choice

It was 2022 I believe, I have (to this day) a Fujifilm X-T2 from 2016, and with a few descent prime lenses. So when I first get started, it seems logical to use the best camera I have. However, once I saw the clips with all the flickering, I know I have to re-think everything.

• It does very minimal processing = it has absolutely terrible PWM flickering.
• It has really short internal recording limit (10 min). After all it was already 6+ years old.
• If it is in "Boost Mode" for too long, it overheats and shut itself off......

On the other hand, while my iPhone 11 Pro is not the latest model, and has way smaller sensor size, it is however designed to allow beginner like me to shoot, and get useable footage 95% of the time. So that's what I ended up using for most of the cases to this day.

Lightning & Audio are very important

While it is more popular / common to discuss what camera or lens to use, given that I am recording basically just (unfortunately statistically speaking) 1 guy the corner of the room, the image quality & cinematography isn't really what people pay attention to. It is the content that people are after, and if the video doesn't have something too distracting, that would be nice.

For useable content, apart from making sure the exposure to the projector screen/TV is correct, the most important is definitely the audio. I have always been a gadget nerd, so I already know a little bit about different kinds of microphone exist. So it doesn't take long for me to figure out lavalier microphone ("lav" for short) is what I need. And another hour of YouTube video watching later, I found a specific model that is not too expensive & has good quality, and that's what I have been using to this date.

Now the content is audible, the last major hurdle I ran into was noise, visual camera sensor noise. Sometimes the rooms are too dark, and it makes the speaker and their movement distracting.....

This was recorded (from X-T2 via HDMI to OBS) during DevFest Berlin 2023, and the image quality drop so much when the light, graciously load by the venue for free, ran out of juice. Thankfully this was more of a lecture-hall setup, so I don't have to worry too much about speaking walking around and pointing things "in the dark" for the camera, but still.

Now before events, apart from setting the camera up, I will also try to see if it is possible to have some spotlight pointing at/near the speaker, and in a lot of office space & event space, all you have to do is ask 👍

Learn how to edit

Just like photography, the videos you get from the camera is not going to be perfect. But unlike photography, there is actually some (semi-)professional-grade software that you can use for free! If you have a macOS device, you can get started on iMovie. I made this back in 2015, and I'd say apart from the resolution, it held up not as bad as I thought!

But if you want to get serious, I would highly recommend DaVinci Resolve. It is a Freemium software, that has most of the bells and whistles that one might need. Cropping, stitching, colour correction, and most recently, trying to reduce the flickering of those god damn PWM LEDs again.

But most importantly, because it is a popular software, there are countless resources online. If I want to do something, I just go to YouTube and find the latest tutorial. From what is & how to do J/L-cut, how to fade-in/out & other animations, how to (try) to rescue some audio clip, and more recently, what does the Fusion tab actually do.

Lastly, Double check everything

• Forgot to charge my phone or the microphones (or both)
• Forgot to turn on the microphone & got a whole session of no audio
• Forgot to bring the right cable to connect the wireless mic receiver to my phone, because for some dumb reason the 3.5mm requires different pinout for camera audio and phone audio 🤬
• Forgot to make sure there is enough storage on the phone, cause I was just travelling and downloaded too much music & movies to watch on the plane ✈️
• Forgot to unplug the charging cable, and the phone stops recording cause it overheats.....

Hope this helps if you want to get started on low(-ish) budget Meetup recording. And if you have any tips & tricks, or questions to ask, just leave a comment below, or DM me on any of the social media platform that is not run by (allegedly) bigots 🤷