I'm Tania Hoser. I'm a cinematographer and I also
occasionally write and do some guest lecturing. At the moment,
I'm working mainly on documentaries, which is good way
of combining my cinematography skills and my life experience,
which has involved quite a lot of travel.
My teaching career has taken me to some amazing places. I worked
in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. I've worked in
Barbados, and I've worked in my local university in Canterbury,
which is where we are now.
It is an exciting time to be an educator, and how we present
what we want to teach about the world is changing too.
So today is not so much about teaching cinematography, it's
about how visuals are used within education, how being on
camera is becoming a real part of learning, and the role of
these Canon cameras in enabling that.
The cameras that we have today are the CR-N300, and the
CR-N500. They're both PTZ cameras, which means they pan,
they tilt, and they zoom in. You'll probably be familiar with
programmes that use PTZ cameras, such as any kind of reality TV.
They don't have camera people standing in the room, they have
PTZs in there, and they are remotely controlled, and they
follow what's going on.
Both of these cameras have a 4K sensor. In the CR-N500, the
sensor allows for Dual Pixel autofocus, which enables the
camera to locate the person who needs to be in focus and if they
move around, focus will stay on that person.
The CR-N300 has hybrid focusing. And hybrid focusing allows the
focusing ability of the camera to still be active in very, very
low light situations. Both of them are really, really
effective for educational purposes.
Today, we're filming in a traditional lecture theatre, and
I've put my PTZ cameras either side of the room so that we can
get two different angles on Mike, who is going to be doing a
short lecture for us. You would also need to make sure that any
cable runs could be taped down or hidden securely. Creatively,
you would want to usually position one on a wider shot and
one on a tighter shot. These cameras operate well and you can
get very good image quality at a very low light level, which
means that it's not essential to put lights on the person who's
giving the class, however, it just does draw the viewer's
attention to them. So it's good to do that, if you have the
opportunity.
In terms of the technical settings for the camera, so that
the picture looks good and you get a good range of colours and
lights and shades, there's actually a fantastic auto
button, which is one of the things that makes them very
simple to use.
We've placed the CR-N300 here, which allows us to get some nice
wide angles of the lecture theatre. And because it has a
20x zoom, if for example, we're showing some tiny detail, people
will be able to learn from that, because they can see the details
perhaps even more clearly than they would do in a classroom,
where they've got quite a few people standing around
something. Once you've set up your cameras, you can start your
class, and you really can just focus yourself on your teaching.
Presets are an amazing feature of these cameras. What you do is
you line up a shot you like and then you just allocate a number,
which is called a preset, to it. Then you line up another shot
and allocate a number to that. All you then have to do is just
press a button, and the camera pans, tilts and zooms as
required. And that's something that makes these cameras far
more flexible than most other camera solutions on the market.
With the trace function, you can select 10 different camera
positions to be used over a period of time, which means you
could have the cameras going all by themselves from wides to
tights, to pans. And that means you really can have a hands-off
approach when you're presenting a class or an educational
experience.
These cameras don't have to be used in isolation. You can pair
them with another camera like Canon's XA45, which is a very
flexible camera easily used in education.
So I hope from what you've seen today, you can see how these
Canon cameras can help you improve not only the current
needs you have in education, but also be ready for the next
stages of education, in which, for example, the prospectus is
no longer on paper. It's very, very much your video and visual
presence online. It's a really, really interesting time at the
moment, not only about what's going on in the world, but about
how we present and teach that to the next generation.