ABSTRACT
The production techniques that video crew members employ vary greatly from person to person, company to company, and country to country. This chapter reviews the most common production techniques in order to broadly prepare producer for the television industry. There are two radically different ways of shooting a video production: single-camera production and multicamera production. All production refinements and supplementary features from background music to video effects are added at a later stage, during the postproduction session. The switcher takes the outputs from various video sources and switches between them. Voiceover narration, sound effects, video effects, graphics, or music are then added in postproduction. A multicamera production director simply switches from one camera to another, which is a clear advantage when shooting a series of events going on at the same time or spread over a wide area. In a live multicamera production, most of the shot transitions are made on a production switcher during the action.
