Reply To: 2015 Taping Policy?

Vince G.: I guess we’ll find out next Monday.

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Check closely to see if your camera has a manual exposure option while in video mode. If it does, you’ll probably want to knock it down a few notches. In my experience, the video shooting option for a point-and-shoot camera is kind of thought of as an add-on or unimportant second function, thus not a lot of verbiage is provided in the manual regarding options for shooting video. So sometimes it can be hard to determine if you can manipulate the exposure in video shooting mode (the manuals says little or nothing about it – and camera reviews rarely delve down that far into the weeds). Furthermore, for point-and-shoot cameras that do have manual exposure in video shooting mode, it’s not unusual for it to reset back to the default settings when you turn it off (which for exposure is always auto-exposure – which is not good for shooting concerts). And you can’t avoid turning off the camera at some point because you’ll have to do a battery change or two during the show. In the heat of the moment while trying to quickly change batteries and get back to shooting the show – it’s easy to forget that you first have to reset it back to manual exposure and set it to the desired level of exposure. A key point here is that point-and-shoot cameras don’t let you adjust the exposure while you’re filming, so if you find yourself in this situation, your two options are to continue filming and shoot over-exposed video, or you can stop filming, reset the exposure, and then restart the filming. Obviously, neither of those are good options. Lastly, you’ll need at least two batteries – three to be safe.

Most of what I’ve said in this post I learned the hard way!