Presto Sample Project, Setup and Event

The Presto user guide uses a sample project of a presentation that was recorded in the Vancouver Contention Centre. This page explains the setup and on-scene work that we did to capture the presentation before using Presto. Using the first two minutes of a presentation, the sample project has everything you need to try out Presto: presenter video, projection screen video, microphone audio, and slide images.

To download the sample Mac project in a ZIP file, click here.
To download the sample Vegas Pro project in a ZIP file, click here.

 

 

Description of the event

The presentation used for this sample was part of Pecha Kucha Night Vancouver #11, a fun event where architects and designers showcased their work in a fast paced format.  The event took place at the Vancouver Convention Centre (Canada Place), in May 2010. Thanks to Michael Gordon (a senior planner with the City of Vancouver) for kindly allowing us to use his presentation for this sample project. 

As shown below, this meeting room had a total of four projection screens.  The two outer screens showed the presenter's slides.  The inner left screen had a static title slide for the event, and the inner right screen displayed a live Twitter feed filtered by the event's hash tag.  Our presenter camera was down this aisle near the front, and our screen camera was off on the far left side.

 

 

 

Equipment Used

Presenter camera & tripod:

Projection screen camera & tripod:

Audio recording:

Miscellaneous Equipment

 

 

Setup of presenter camera

The presenter camera was placed in the left hand aisle about 5 rows back.  The tripod was setup to be as high as it could go to keep it well above the heads of people in the front rows.  The fluid head on this tripod helped achieve smooth panning.

In general it is best if you can put the presenter camera on the same side of the room as the presenter.  This creates a more natural look to the Presto presentation because the presenter then tends to be looking toward the center of the room, and thus slightly facing toward the "screen" in the Presto two-up layout, as illustrated by the example below. It is preferable if you can avoid being too far away from the presenter, otherwise panning requires very small movements on the pan handle.

 

 

 

 

Setup of screen camera

The projection screen camera was placed about 10 rows back at the very left hand edge of the seating, in order to get a reasonably straight shot onto one of the two projection screens that were showing the presenters slides.  Again, the tripod was set to be about as high as it could go to keep it well above the heads of people in the front rows. For this camera, a low cost tripod is quite adequate because it is simply left locked down for the whole event.

 

 

The zoom on this camera was adjusted so that the projected slide almost filled the frame, as shown below.  It is also advisable to lock the focus because auto focus can have difficulty with certain types of slides, such as title slides without much text.

 

 

Capturing the audio and slides

For this event we were able to plug directly into the sound board with the Zoom recorder, using a line-level feed via a TRS connector into the sound board.  The Zoom was left running continuously for the whole event, which lasted about two hours. 

The slides were given to us in the form of a Keynote presentation, copied to our USB flash drive.

 

Recording the presentation

During the recording of the event, the cameras were briefly stopped and re-started in between each presentation.  This is a big help in post production, because each presentation then comes off the cameras as a separate video file. And thanks to our PluralEyes software, there is no need to try to carefully synchronize this stop/start action between the cameras, or use timecode equipment. It would have been helpful to do the same stop/start thing with the audio recording on the Zoom, but we did not have another person available to manage that.

The only camera that needs to be actively operated is the presenter camera, in order to keep the presenter in the shot.  It is best to keep the shot quite wide (as illustrated by the example frame below), remembering that Presto will be closely tracking the presenter for us in post.  So what works well is to keep the presenter within the middle third of the frame, and only start following them if they wander outside this zone.  For presenters who remain glued to the podium, this means the camera operator can be hands off for a while!

Since the screen camera remains locked on the projection screen, the person operating this camera only needs to know how to start and stop recording.  It could even be managed via a remote control, as long as there is some way to visually confirm (e.g. via a recording light) that the camera is recording when it should be.  A safer option is to simply leave it running, and use the start/stop events on the presenter video to establish the extent of each presentation.