Lighting Resources for Live Event Production

I recently received an email asking about resources for video and webinar production. I sent off a list of video production, audio, and lighting related resources, so I thought I would expand upon that in three blog posts. This third and final post is on lighting-related resources for streaming production. 

Let me start by commenting that if you’re not adding lights to your webinar or video conference productions, your quality is almost certainly impaired. There’s a reason that TV studios and news rooms are bathed in copious amounts of light; it’s absolutely necessary to produce noise-free video. In fact, if you compare the output of a $30 webcam with good lighting, or a $6,000 camcorder with poor lighting, the webcam will almost always win. You don’t have to spend a fortune on lighting, but you do need to add supplemental lights. 

OK, lecture over. Here are the resources. 

Light the Way: A Beginner’s Guide to Video Lighting on a Budget – If you’re a total newbie, start here. You’ll learn a bit about color temperature, and your very low cost options for lighting a webinar or web conference. The article details how to light a single person shoot, and a two-person shoot. 

Choosing Cameras and Lighting for Single-Speaker Webinars (1): I actually presented this as a webinar, which hopefully gives the topic some credibility. Here’s the webinar embedded from YouTube, but if you click over to the webinar page you can see individual videos from the camcorders/webcams that I tested and download the handout