Three cameras
Three DSLRs on tripods, positioned for a wide, a centre, and an angle. Enough coverage that a cut always has somewhere to go.
Gobo Studios · a DBA of Monterey Skates LLC · Monterey, CA · (831) 264-8797 · gobostudios.com
Live A/V and streaming
Three angles, one program feed.
Multi-camera video, switched live alongside the slides, with the audio handled by the same person who is watching the room. Recorded, streamed, or both.
This is the oldest thing we do. It came before the lighting and before the software: seventeen years of A/V support for the International Making Cities Livable Conference, from 2002 to 2019.
What this actually is
Not a camera in the back of the room.
A single locked-off camera at the back of a hall produces something nobody watches. What makes a recording worth keeping is cutting between angles while it happens, and hearing every word.
Seventeen years at one conference
From 2002 to 2019 we ran A/V for the International Making Cities Livable Conference — multi-camera video, conference audio, and recordings of the sessions. Seventeen years of the same job, in a different venue each time, for an audience that had travelled a long way to hear it.
Switched live
Three cameras and the presenter's slides all feed a hardware switcher. Cuts happen in the room, as it runs, so there is a finished program at the end rather than four files and a weekend of editing.
Audio done properly
Wireless for the people moving, wired tabletop microphones for a panel that stays seated. The recording carries the same audio the room hears, not a camera's onboard microphone picking up the air conditioning.
One operator
The same person runs the switcher, the audio, and the stream. For most rooms that is the right size. If yours needs a second pair of hands, that is in the quote before you sign, not discovered on the day.
The kit
What comes in the van.
Counts, not adjectives. This is the whole list.
HDMI switcher
Hardware video switching across all three cameras plus a laptop feed, so slides are a source like any other and cut in cleanly instead of being dropped in afterwards.
Microphones
Up to four wireless mics for presenters and roving questions, plus four wired tabletop microphones for panels and boards.
Sound and projection
The same PA that covers a gym, sized down for a meeting room, plus a projector and portable screen for the front of house.
Streaming goes to whichever platform you already use. We do not host it, and we do not keep the footage longer than it takes to hand it over.
Where it fits
Rooms where people are listening.
Conferences and all-hands
Multi-session days, a stage, slides that have to be legible at the back, and a recording someone will actually publish afterwards. This is the work the kit was bought for.
Graduations and award nights
A ceremony has one take. Three angles means the walk across the stage is covered even when a parent steps into the aisle, and a stream means the family who could not travel still sees it.
Board and public meetings
Tabletop microphones for the dais, a clean feed of the presentation, and a recording that matches what the minutes say happened.
Hybrid rooms
Half the audience in the room and half on a link. The people at home get the switched program and the microphone audio, not a laptop camera pointed at a screen.
Filming students is a district decision, not ours
Recording or streaming an event with minors in the room runs into your district's own policy on photography, consent, and where footage is allowed to live. Tell us the policy and we will work inside it — cameras placed to avoid the audience, a stream that ends when the ceremony does, footage handed over and deleted. What we will not do is get you sideways with your own opt-out list.
After the event
The recording is usually the point.
Most of the time the switched program is not the deliverable — it is the raw material. The same shoot carries through to a finished, published video, and it is the same person who was in the room doing the cutting.
“Climate Change and Urban Design” — a conference session shot and cut by us, published on the International Making Cities Livable channel.
- Script and plan. For anything that is not a live capture — a promotional piece, a walkthrough, a recruitment video — it starts on paper, with you approving the outline before anyone shoots.
- Shoot. The same three cameras and the same audio kit. If it is a live event, this step already happened.
- Edit. Cut, colour, titles, slides cut back in at full resolution rather than as a camera pointed at a screen, and audio that is mixed rather than merely present.
- Publish. Delivered in the format your platform wants, or uploaded to your channel if you would rather we did. You own the files either way.
Editing is not a sideline here. Max Troyer is Professor of Professional Practice and Grover Hermann Endowed Chair in Translation and Localization Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where the courses he teaches include Audio-Visual Localization and Media and A/V Production — Premiere Pro and After Effects, taught to graduate students every term.
Captions and subtitles
Captioned properly, or subtitled into another language.
Auto-generated captions are a draft, not a deliverable. They mangle names, they miss the technical vocabulary, and on a public recording they are the first thing somebody complains about.
Subtitling to streaming-industry standard — reading speed, line breaks, timing, character limits — is a specialism, and it is one taught in the classroom here. So is subtitling into a second language, which matters if your audience is not all English-speaking.
- Captions checked and corrected against the actual audio, not shipped as the machine wrote them.
- Subtitle files in the format your platform expects, handed over with the video.
- A second language where the audience needs one. Rare in a local A/V company; ordinary here.
If your organisation has an accessibility requirement for published recordings, tell us at enquiry and it is built into the quote rather than added afterwards.
What it costs
This one is quoted, and here is why.
Every other service here publishes a price, because a school dance is a known shape. A/V is not — a two-hour ceremony with one stream and a three-day conference with breakouts share almost nothing. Publishing one number would mean overcharging half of you.
So instead, here is exactly what moves the number. You can work out roughly where you land before you ask.
- Hours on site, including rehearsal. A ceremony is a morning. A conference day starts before the first session and ends after the last.
- How many cameras you need. One angle is cheaper than three. Three is what makes a recording watchable.
- How many people speak, and whether they move. A seated panel is four wired microphones. A room with roving questions is wireless and someone tracking them.
- Stream, record, or both. Streaming adds a platform, a test, and a dependency on your building's upload speed, which we check beforehand.
- Whether one operator is enough. Most rooms, yes. Multi-room days, no.
- Where it is. Same travel policy as everything else — seven towns included, published rate beyond.
Asked before
The ones that come up first.
Next
Tell us the date and the room.
Send the date, the venue, roughly how many people, and whether it needs streaming. You get availability and a written quote back, not a call-me-to-discuss.