Ground School - Recording

[FreelanceInstructor]

Hey everyone!

I'll be conducting a ground school course of my own to a group of roughly 10 students, and I was hoping to record audio/video of the classes to be used in future projects of mine. I was wondering if anyone knew of a good way to get good quality audio and a way of recording multiple hours of video without having to stop mid-session to swap SD cards in a GoPro? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

--FreelanceInstructor

[RedAndWhiteBaron]

Ask photofly, a forum member here. He records all his prefight briefings and lessons.

[amaksr]

GoPro is an action camera, may not be the best choice for long classroom videos. Camcorders usually offer better recording time, higher quality (especially in low-light conditions), sometime options to transfer files via WiFi automatically, more connectivity options, etc.
For good audio you generally need to have microphone close to the mouth. This usually means external microphone, which is either connected using wireless transmitter to the camera, or by wire to some field recorder. The cheapest option is to have clip-on lavalier microphone (e.g. Audio Technica ATR3350iS) connected to spare smartphone with voice recording app. But it will require some editing in order to mix video from camera with the audio from smartphone.

[photofly]

You have to decide what "future projects" are going to be: a simple record so you can review your own standard of training? Something to show to a student who missed one session? Something you can sell on the internet as a ground school course to make you rich?

You will end up with (at least) 40 hours of video, many tens of gigabytes of data, and you had better have a workflow that permits you to deal sensibly with it.

I will tell you now that the problem with audio recorded separately from video is lip sync: the bit rates won't match and you'll need to be able quickly and easily to stretch or shrink the audio by quantities of around a second, over the course of a three hour recording, to keep it in sync with the audio. And you'll be doing that for every segment of 40 hours of video. For sheer simplicity, prefer a radio mic (buy, or hire) connected to whatever camera you use.

I don't know that there's anything wrong with a GoPro if you use an external power source. Keep the bit rate low, and buy big SD cards. Costco has 256Gb cards for $49.

The post production effort can easily take longer than the actual teaching, and will overwhelm you. Keep things simple.

[piperdriver]

Ask photofly, a forum member here. He records all his prefight briefings and lessons.

Photofly=Flightchops?

[rookiepilot]

Ask photofly, a forum member here. He records all his prefight briefings and lessons.

Photofly=Flightchops?

Everyone has future aspirations.

[photofly]

I think that's tautologous - aspirations are hopes for the future.