Camera/Recording setup for classroom

Community
1

I am a bit out of my depth here and would appreciate some recommendations from the community.

My wife is a public school teacher and she needs to take videos of her teaching for her masters program. In the past she has used her iPhone but exporting videos to her laptop for editing is a royal PITA. She tried using my Sony A6000 but it automatically shuts down due to overheating/batteries after a few minutes.

Any recommendations on what direction to go here? I am really out of touch with AV/Video stuff and need some suggestions.

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Maybe a higher quality webcam into a laptop with OBS?
Depending on what is of interest (Blackboard, students reaction, etc.)

Microphone/Room audio may be the bigger hurdle here.
A Lav-Mic and recorder in the back pocket / on the belt could work to get “speaker audio”. For room audio (= students, etc.) I am a bit out of my depth. Maybe boundary mic?

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Thanks for the reply!

She needs to see the entire room of about 30 kids. I was considering getting a mic for her but was wondering how good microphones are on camcorders are these days. Or maybe a cheap shotgun mic?

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Not much experience with camcorders. I would assume them to work just fine (else the smartphone would have kicked them from the market).

Depends a lot on the room though. A room with a lot of echo/reverb will be extremely hard to mic up no matter what.

Another idea would be in-ear headphones with an in-line mic on the wire into her smartphone. The quality is stunning for the 15€/$ of that “setup”. Bluetooth in-ears or true-wireless would not work since bidirectional has quality shortcommings.

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I don’t think she can have anything in her ears. No earbuds, airpods, monitors, etc.

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Can use a safety pin/paperclip/small clamp/etc. to hold the ear-part somewhere in the clothes with the mic somewhere near normal wearing position.

Then again, a Lav-Mic from reputable brands is not breaking the bank either. “Rode SmartLav” would be one example.

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I’ll check it out

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Get a HDMI capture device and use a laptop possibly with an external mic?

I don’t see what the issue is with exporting a video from an iPhone though.

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9

As much as I don’t like these kind of products I think this is the niche it’s built for: Insta360 Link.
It’s on a gimbal so can follow around and has a neat feature to snap focus to project a full screen whiteboard (if it’s useful in any way in this situation).
Regarding audio I think the best choice is a lavalier microphone since it’s discreet (some can be clipped under shirts so it’s invisible) and I think that any of those clip wireless mics will be really nice.
This, in my opinion, the best setup, especially if there’s movement and a white board is involved.

If not I think that any old USB HDMI capture card will do to avoid overheating on the A6000 you already have (but you’re gonna need to trim the video to remove the OSD that’s on screen when capturing through HDMI) and a cabled lavalier mic plugged into the PC will do fantastic. Everything can be captures through OBS at any setting you think are good for the job.

OT: if she’s using a white board I suggest to add to the purchase even a simple Wacom tabled that’s 50$ to take notes for the lesson and maybe even share the notes at the end of each lesson. I tried asking for this to my university teachers for ages but very very few picked up on this simple but effective trick to improve lessons.

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