All of the videos I’ve made up until now have been filmed on either of my iPhones: 6s plus and 7. They’re really great for learning the basics and not so complicated you get overwhelmed quickly with features.
However.
Our St. Stephen’s church videos (and preparations for my harp videos as well) have grown a bit more sophisticated over time.
Enter our new camera! This coming Sunday, February 7th George’s YouTube prelude and postlude for Zoom church services was filmed with our new Canon XA-11 video camera.
Behind the camera!
Recording video and audio of George Matthew playing the pipe organ at St. Stephen’s.
Here is “The Beautiful City”, George’s postlude featuring hymn improvisations on well-known Spirituals in honor of Black History Month:
Thanks to everyone who’s enjoyed and followed our church videos so far! For comparison, here’s the incredibly popular January 31st postlude with George Matthew at St. Stephen’s pipe organ, shot on an iPhone 6s Plus with the Mavis app and edited in iMovie.
(Note: stock photos sourced from Dreamstime.com, credits at the end.) In some videos I took a few interior still shots of St. Stephen’s and in others members of the congregation emailed photos to me: choir, procession, kids, etc.
And coming soon, post-production in Final Cut Pro X, professional video editing software that offers a lot more than the consumer-friendly iMovie (which is a good place to start learning if you’re a beginner, btw). These two are the software applications that allow me to place all the fancy titles, blend photo montages and so on, after importing raw video footage from the camera.
Check out my Books & Websites section for the titles I’ve been reading to come up to speed on this stuff 
Feel free to email me if you’re just starting to do this for your own church or you’ve been at it for some time. I’m still learning too. And get yourself a copy of your camera’s owner’s manual if you haven’t already and keep it with you as you study… it helps a lot. I’ve been putting sticky notes in mine.
More later!