It's one thing to see yourself in the bathroom mirror it's another to be filmed outside in the wild doing something public.
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of chairing the second Mentor panel in this years New Ventures BC competition. I, along with half a dozen or so other mentors, saw eight of the final 30 competitors present their pitch which we then gave feedback on.
The panels are an opportunity for the competitors to practice ahead of hopefully making the final 10 in the competition and presenting to the competition Judges in September. This year one of the pieces of feedback that came out was for one competitor to have their presentation filmed. The idea being that you learn an amazing amount about how you appear to others from watching yourself on screen.
I realised that it had been at least 15 years since I had done this. As it happens the team I am co-mentoring in the competition this year, Singular Software, has a great product for use in multi-camera applications and I was keen to offer the idea of a test application. This week I gave my 11th Toastmaster speech, the first in the Advanced Communicator, Storytelling manual. Bruce Sharpe from Singular came along with two cameras and together with a sound recorder and my digital camera recorded the event.
I've only seen the raw videos as it were, but a couple of things come immediately to mind. Firstly, Bruce's software is quite simply amazing. Basically you load all the video recordings and sound recordings into something like Final Cut Pro and press go. Bruce's software then examines all the clips and synchronises the timing of them. I was able to look at the screen and see three different videos and the sound from the speech all running at the same time and all totally in sync! I was chatting to Bruce while the software did it's thing, but this seemed to take only a few seconds to do.
I'm no expert in video and/or sound recording. However I can see how even with the simplest single camera recording and a soundtrack that getting the two lined up can be a challenge. So to do this with multiple cameras and sound is very very cool. I can see this would save tons of time and as we know, time is money! Additionally of course this enables you to create more interesting videos of an event through using multiple angles. Add to this of course that your sources could be from different people at say, a sports event or a wedding and you can really have some fun.
The second thing I want to mention is that the advise from the mentor panel is spot on. I've only watched myself once but now some of the comments I received from my evaluators make far more sense! I'm really looking forward to seeing what Bruce does with the videos and I'm hoping to put it up on this blog, so stay tuned for some more posts about the experience – it's been a huge learning experience for me.
Looking in the bathroom mirror this morning I saw a different person staring back at me. Now I need to work out who that is 
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