Studio711.com – Ben Martens

After my last post on Friday about the new camcorder I use for recording at church, it dawned on me that I’ve never written up some of my learnings from recording public events. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve made enough mistakes that I have some things to share.

• Get there early. If you’ve never recorded at the venue, go there days ahead of when you’ll actually need to record. Figure out where all the gear will go and where the action will be taking place. But even if you’ve recorded at the same place many times, you can’t arrive too early. There’s always something that needs extra attention.
• Don’t try to do this without a good video editing package that you’re familiar with. I like Adobe Premiere Elements. Whatever you use, you need (at a minimum) to have the ability to sync individual audio and video tracks and then cut between them.
• Unless you are going to have a completely stationary camera, you’ll need at least two cameras. Leave one at a wide angle capturing everything and then do your zooming with the other camera. You can cut to the wide angle while you’re adjusting/zooming the second camera and then switch back to the zoomed view once you’ve got it all set up properly.
• Have at least one backup for everything. So if you’re using the two camera setup described above, make sure you have at least three cameras in the process. For the audio, hopefully you can record straight off the sound mixer, but also set a little portable audio recorder up near the action to use as a last resort. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been saved by what I thought was just an extra device.
• Plan for people getting in your way. If all of your cameras are clustered in the same spot, one person walking in front of you can ruin all of the angles at the same time. Scatter your cameras around the building.
• Start recording early. Don’t try to hit record right as the action starts. Figure out what time it’s scheduled and then walk around hitting record about 5 minutes early. This gives you time to fix any last minute issues, and then you’ll be comfortable behind your main camera well before anything exciting happens.
• The most time consuming part of this for me is always syncing up the various audio/video tracks. If you can pull it off, walk into the view of all the cameras and clap your hands together. (Or if you’re fancy, use one of the clap boards like they do in the movies.) That’s almost never feasible for me so I have to revert to other tricks. Sometimes I’ll cough really loud after turning on all the equipment. Other times I’ll just do my best to work with some other noise/visual that most of the gear picked up. Inevitably I spend a ton of time moving clips back and forth frame by frame trying to get them all lined up.

The more I do it, the more I learn because I keep finding new ways to screw up! If you want to check out my work, a lot of it ends up on the church’s YouTube page.

Things were a little different last year. Our little man has really grown up. I love you!

I’m done with airline miles and points. I want money back from my credit card. In 2008 I switched to mainly using the American Express Blue Cash card which has really good returns for no annual fee. We average just around 1.7% back every year on our purchases with that card. But since not everyone takes American Express, we also carry a Visa. In 2004 I signed up for a card which gave me points for Sony products. Since then I’ve gotten two digital cameras, a camcorder, noise canceling headphones, and two under-cabinet radios. We’re still accruing points but I’ve come to realize that I don’t really want anything that Sony makes anymore. Or at least I don’t want to be forced to chose from only their products. So it’s time to switch!

We ended up choose the Amazon Visa card. We get 3% back on Amazon purchases and credits for all other purchases as well. The rewards come in the form of Amazon points which, for as much as we shop there, is effectively like cash. There’s no minimum required number of points to redeem them.

Part of me thinks it’s fun to get these rewards, but a bigger part of me wishes that credit card companies would just charge lower transaction fees and we could skip all these silly rewards. Just charge me less for the original product and I’ll be happy.

About a year or so ago, the pastor of our church (Pastor Weiser), announced that he would be going into semi-retirement this summer. Instead of just retiring like most people his age, he’s taking a half-time job as our missionary in Nigeria. He’ll spend quite a few months out of each year over there helping to train new Nigerian pastors. It’s always been one of his passions and he’s spent a lot of time there over the decades. I’m excited for him, but that leaves us without a Pastor.

I’ve heard a few comments/questions that can generally be summarized to “What happens if you don’t agree with what your new Pastor teaches?” I’m very thankful and happy to say that there is almost no chance that this will happen and I’ll explain why in this post.

Our local church, Calvary Lutheran Church, is part of a bigger group called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod or WELS for short. The WELS is the central body that oversees all the churches to make sure we all teach exactly the same thing. While the types of church buildings and the styles of the church services might change from one WELS church to another, I can walk into any one of them and know that they are teaching exactly what the Bible says.

So when our Pastor left, we went put out a “call” for a new pastor. I won’t dive into the details of what a call is and why we do it because the WELS website already has a good description of that. I’ll just briefly say that the process is based on the Bible’s teachings and it’s not like a normal job interview. We ended up getting a Pastor who was just graduating from the WELS seminary. This will be his very first congregation.

Getting back to the original question, even though he’s never led a congregation before, I’m confident that he’ll stay true to God’s Word. His schooling included four years at our teacher/pastor training school (Martin Luther College) and then an additional four years at our seminary (Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary.) He’s well-versed in all of the Bible’s theology and he knows the original languages that it was written in (Greek and Hebrew) so that he can always go back to the most original manuscripts when needed.

But hey, everyone is human and we all sin. All of this training and process doesn’t mean that every single pastor is always right on target. Thankfully there are lots of checks and balances in place. First of all, every single person in the church should be actively listening and testing the words that the Pastor preaches. The book of 1 John teaches us to “test the spirits.” We should be comparing everything the Pastor teaches to what the Bible teaches. If they don’t align, we should investigate and question until the issue is resolved. In the worst case, this could be escalated all the way to the synod body which could take action to remove a Pastor from the synod entirely.

This is quite a bit more rigid and strict than many other church bodies, but that is what has kept our group of churches so rock solid on the teachings of the Bible. I’m very thankful that when I move to a new area or go on vacation, I don’t have to search around for a church. I just pull up the WELS directory, find a convenient location and start attending.