Behind-the-Scenes: How We Shot Interviews at the 2024 NAB Show

Three weeks before the 2024 NAB Show, I got a call from Sam Bogoch, President of Axle AI, asking if I was interested in a sponsorship to shoot interviews at the show.

First, I said “YES!” Then, I scrambled to make it happen. Here’s what we did.

NOTE: You can find all our interviews indexed here.

The show halls were busy all four days. This is South Hall, Lower Level on Monday.

THE SCHEDULE

Reaching out to my network of PR firms and industry contacts – along with using a lot of website contact forms – I invited 102 firms to participate. 60 said yes and scheduled a time; though three cancelled during the show.

NOTE: There was no cost or fee associated with any interview.

Over the course of four show days, my team and I shot 57 interviews covering all four buildings at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This averaged one new interview – with B-roll – every 20 minutes, with no two locations the same.

Like all shoots, I wanted more time with each guest. And, like all shoots, reality intervened.

THE CREW

The reason I love production is that I really enjoy being part of a team. Doing these interviews as a “one-man-band” holds no attraction to me – I like the creative energy of working with a group. For this project, I was very fortunate to find two talented and enthusiastic free-lancers: Alex Woods, camera, and Ryan Krauza, Lighting/PA. Both were excellent, reliable and fun to work with.

The four-day shooting schedule.

THE PROCESS

Each day’s shoot was scheduled with contact, company, booth number and time, as pictured above.

At the start of the day, Ryan would head to the first interview to make sure the person we needed to interview was ready for us. Alex and I would gather our gear and follow along a couple of minutes later.

Signed media release forms and stapled business cards.

Ryan had each guest sign a release form, then stapled their business card to the form so I could verify spelling during the edit. (Yes, NAB is all about companies seeking publicity, but there’s no harm in covering the legal exposure. This is a version of a form I’ve used for years for the Digital Production Buzz.)

Alex and I would show up to record the interview a few minutes after Ryan. Interviews ran roughly five minutes each. During the interview, Ryan held a fill light which made a BIG difference in the quality of the image. (More on this in a minute.)

During the shoot, Alex would run camera and wear a headset to make sure the audio was OK. (Her hearing is better than mine.) When the interview was done, Ryan would leave to track down the next guest, while Alex shot B-roll; mostly at her discretion, but, then, she had also heard what was discussed in the interview. I would visit with each guest to learn more about their company and products.

This process made it easy for us to maximize our shooting time by limiting the amount of time we spent tracking down errant guests. It also helped that Ryan would text me landmarks so we could find the next booth quickly. It is easy to get lost at NAB.

UPDATE: One other note occurred to me after I wrote this: Easily a third of our guests did not have business cards and their handwriting was terrible. I need to figure out a better way to accurately verify the spelling and capitalization of names, titles and companies. (I guessed wrong for four movies.) I also need to make sure to capture their email address for any needed follow-up. Collecting business cards makes this much easier – if they exist!

THE CAMERA

We used my Sony alpha 7ii DSLR, with a Tamron 28-200 f2.8 zoom lens. The images were gorgeous. In fact, the backgrounds were softer than I expected, which blurred the company logos a bit more than I would prefer. The lens is great, but it is not designed for live video – so zooms were shaky.

We used a borrowed tripod which was light and easy to carry, but also designed for stills. It had very, very limited pan and tilt capability. Next time, I’ll bring a tripod designed for video. (We had boundless enthusiasm, but a very limited budget.)

The only problem with the camera was the auto-focus. It had a mind of its own and, frequently felt the background was more interesting than the person talking. This made editing with limited B-roll more, ah, challenging.

THE LIGHT

The magic behind these images was a small LumeCube light, which Ryan hand-held to fill in the face.

This little light made all the difference. Shadows were smoothed, without blinding the talent. Because the light was held to the side, textures and modeling were retained. (These often get washed out when the light comes from the same location as the lens.)

I added a LumeCube Power Grip, which you see Ryan holding in the phot above. This provided a large external battery for the light. Even running the LumeCube for several hours each day, we never came close to exhausting this battery.

NOTE: We ran the light at 65% power, 5500°K to match the lighting in the hall. The LumeCube can be adjusted from 2800° – 6000°K. We also used a diffusion filter to soften the light.

THE MIC

I purchased a Sennheiser MD46 hand-held mic specifically for this event, based on the recommendation of the folks at B&H Photo. This mic was designed by Sennheiser to meet the needs of NBC covering the Olympics.

It had excellent noise rejection with good voice quality, provided the speaker was directly in front of the mic, and a good wind screen.

However, every time I toggled between pointing the mic at a guest or myself, there was a loud pop of handling noise. Every time. I finally gave up editing these out. If you listen, you’ll hear these pops in all the interviews. Sigh… It never occurred to me that a hand mic would have a hand noise problem. I should have tested this more.

I’ll be returning the mic to B&H.

NOTE: Wireless mics are risky in a tech environment like NAB. RF is EVERYWHERE. A hard-wired mic generally provides higher sound quality with no risk of interference.

OTHER AUDIO

I connected the mic to a Zoom H4n. This served as both a preamp for the mic and, by applying an audio compressor in the Zoom, it meant that the camera was recording distortion-free audio at a good level without us needing to constantly ride levels. This simplified the audio edit because all the audio was clean and loud.

I did, however, add a second compressor/limiter effect during editing to boost and stabilize all levels before exporting the final movie.

EDITING

The Sony camera recorded 1080p/29.97 video using the H.264 codec. This footage was edited natively – no proxies – using Apple Final Cut Pro running on an M2 Max Mac Studio. I chose FCP because of its speed. FCP renders and exports more than twice as fast as Premiere Pro. Compressor is at least 1.5X faster than Media Encoder.

While it would have been nice to use the Speech-to-Text feature in Premiere, I realized that the limited B-roll meant that I couldn’t do a lot of fancy editing – nor did I have time for finesse. With this much material in such limited time, this was more like cutting news than a feature.

FCP delivered great images at high-speed. I took advantage of “Send to Compressor” to automate the entire export and compression process. At no time did FCP slow down – it displayed video as fast as I dragged the mouse.

While the audio capability of Premiere is far superior to that of Final Cut, I applied a Multipresser audio filter in FCP to automatically compress audio levels and limit them to -3 dB so that it was easy to hear each speaker without resorting to keyframes. Here the noise reduction provided by the mic was a big help.

Also, FCPs text templates are easier to change than Premiere’s.

NOTE: The opening title was creating in Motion.

SUMMARY

I am very pleased with the results. The images looked great, each speaker could be easily heard regardless of how noisy it was in the hall, and the entire process ran smoothly. What impressed me even more was the quality of the content. Each interview was short, focused, and informative. I learned a lot with each one.

My hope is to repeat this process again next year. Next time, I’ll use a camera with more reliable auto-focus and a better tripod. I’ll also test the mic more extensively before taking it into live production. For the interviews, a crew of two is enough, but I will schedule a bit more time for each interview to allow time for better B-roll. I also need to run lens tests so the background isn’t quite so blurry.

But, it was great to be back at NAB, back into production, and visiting with long-time friends.

---

Bookmark the permalink.