How to set up a basic camera/monitor system?

[JimAndFrank]

So, I've been thinking of taking up puppetry for a hobby for quite a while now. I have a puppet ready to go, but I'm afraid my knowledge of working with cameras, let alone setting them up with a monitor is quite poor.

Could someone please lend me some advice? I have no clue of how to get started!

 

[D'Snowth]

If you're just looking to do this as a hobby, I would suggest investing in a handycam (Sony and Canon are known for retailing recommended entry-level handycams for usually no more than a couple of hundred bucks), as pretty much all of them have pull-out panels with LCD display screens that you can rotate so that you can look at it while you're filming like a monitor.

That's what I used to do with my old JVC camcorder (back when camcorders and handycams still used tape) when I did the first four seasons of Steve D'Monster's YouTube series. Afterwards I used a digital camera for video, which wasn't too great because capturing video was merely a function, it wasn't a video camera, so the picture quality was mediocre, the audio was terrible, and I couldn't see what I was doing because the display screen was on the back of the camera itself (though I, somehow, was amazingly able to get novel results by almost virtually performing blind).

Earlier in the year I invested in a Sony AVCHD handycam, and one thing I found interesting was when rotating the display panel to face me while filming, the display picture automatically reverses itself so you don't have to try to adjust doing the opposite of what you see on a monitor.

They usually come with different video setting and audio settings that you can play with to get desired results.

 

[JimAndFrank]

Okay, so that gives me a better idea of what I need. Thanks! But what about a monitor? What's the ideal type of screen to use?

 

[Iscah]

A cheap TV is probably a good start - you can try getting an old CRT (box-shaped) one secondhand - or even flat-screen TVs are at the point where you can get smaller old ones cheap. Also try "Freecycle", which is a website/mailing list where you can offer and request items for free; someone might have one to give away.

Ideally your video camera should come with a cable that connects to the RCA (red/white/yellow) input on your TV. If you connect it up and put the camera into "record" mode (it doesn't need to actually be recoding) it should send a live feed from the camera to the TV.

 

[D'Snowth]

But what about a monitor? What's the ideal type of screen to use?

That's what I was saying: almost all handycams come with pull-out display screen panels that you can rotate as needed - if you're in front of the camera, you can rotate the panel to face you so you can see what you're filming, and that works like a monitor.

 

[ashkent]

I have the same Sony handycam at the minute that i use for most of my video work. The screen is great to flip out although I work with green screen so the camera tends to be about three metres away and it can sometimes be hard to make out if the puppet is looking directly at the camera or up in the air.

I got around this by using a webcam mounted as close to the camera lens a possible and connected to my laptop. So i usually have a copy of the script on one side of the laptop screen and the webcam feed on the other so i can see them both just in front of me. It has worked well so far.

For the audio, i tend to record the audio with Audacity simultaneously via a headset and then sync the file up with the video file afterwards.

I think it really does just depend how much you want to pay out for the equipment but like it has already been said there are plenty of ways to get tv's and i guess old laptops for next to nothing if you go hunting.

 

[D'Snowth]

Similarly, for a while when I was using my old digital camera, I eventually started redubbing the dialogue afterwards since the audio was so terrible - I've often thought about recording simultaneously, because I could never really figure out how I could do that, especially times when I had to shoot in different locations (including outdoors and on location).

 

[Buck-Beaver]

If you use a webcam - or a "flip out" LCD screen - make sure it is giving you a reversed image (when you move your puppet right, it moves left on screen and vice versa). This is disorienting at first, but it means that you are seeing what the camera actually sees. This is how the Muppets are performed and the way most professional on-camera puppeteers work.

Sometimes, webcams or those "flip out" screens on cameras give you a mirror image (when you move your puppet in a certain direction, it moves in the same direction onscreen). The problem with this is that you don't actually see the same image that the viewer ultimately does and, performance wise, it serves as a bit of a crutch that prevents you from learning to work reversed.

Marcus Clarke has written a great article about the benefits of working reverse.

There is also a somewhat old, but still great article about how to properly set-up practice monitors by Leo Brodie that can be found here that you might want to read for more tips.