I went to Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg with an ambitious plan; I would make video highlights of several exhibits (booths) to be presented to the *Related sites audience.  I would try to make the vendors focus their pitch on the essential in order to produce a one to three minutes video per booth.

So far my experience with making videos was limited to family videos, so I knew I had lots of reading to do and lots of Youtube videos and tutorials to watch.  Trade shows are challenging to shoot because they usually happen indoor, lighting varies wildly from booth to booth and there is a constant and usually intense background noise (crowd) to deal with.

Once I started to understand what I was getting myself into, it was clear that I needed to invest in lots of new gear:

1. A gimbal for my phone in order to capture some stable footage of the booths
2. A shotgun mic to attach to my Nikon D5300 DSLR in order to record some usable backup audio
3. A field monitor to facilitate precise focusing on the subjects (the screen on the camera is too small)
4. LED lights to get better lighting on the subjects
5. Digital audio recorder to record audio from a Lavalier Microphone (that I rented). 
6. A new fast lens that would perform well indoor

Considering this was a first for me, I am relatively happy with the way things turned out.  But there is so much room for improvements and I cannot wait to do this again at future shows to apply some of the things I have learned from my mistakes.  I consider myself about 50% of the way to where I would like to be in terms of overall "quality" of the videos.  

If you find the time to watch the videos, I would greatly appreciate if you could take a minute to share with me some of your impressions.  Is the music a distraction?  Is it too loud or too soft?  Are the voices loud enough?  Are the videos too short or too long?  Which videos are your favourites? etc.  Thank you!

Please be warned that all videos start with a very similar introduction that lasts about 20-25 seconds.  I changed the timings in order for the intro to go with the music but other than that, I used the same footage (train, people walking, etc).

General Highlights

On day 1, I had no appointments with vendors and my goal was to walk around, get familiar with the venue and grab some footage of whatever attracted my attention in order to make a general highlights video.  At first and maybe for the first hour, I felt overwhelmed and somewhat paralysed by the size (HUGE!) of the event and venue.  With more than 1000 exhibits spread across 6 gigantic rooms, I needed a plan.  I eventually got my mojo and stopped feeling intimidated by the attention that I was attracting with my camera.  Here is a montage of the footage that I captured.

Booths (exhibits) Highlights

On day 2 and 3, I had several appointments with many different vendors at their booths.  It was a real marathon as I walked and walked from booth to booth with all my gear.  I am not complaining, it was fun!  But at the end of the day, I was completely exhausted (and jet lagged!).  Here are the videos I was able to produce from the footage I recorded at the booths.

Texas Instruments

Cypress Semiconductors

NXP

Atollic

SYSGO

SYSGO took a 'making-of' photo and tweeted it:

Video recording @embedded_world by @EmbeddedRelated. Visit @sysgo in hall 4-308 and learn more about our #RTOS and #Hypervisor #PikeOS pic.twitter.com/CXrsBaiQEI

— SYSGO (@sysgo) March 15, 2017

National Instruments

Percepio

Mender.io

Jacob Beningo

Finally, I asked Jacob (EmbeddedRelated blogger among other things) if he would be willing to share some of his impressions of Embedded World 2017 in front of my camera and he agreed!  Next time Jacob, I will make sure not to cut your head and we will use a better angle - thanks for agreeing to do this!

Your impressions?

So, what do you think?  What should I do differently next time to make those videos more effective, more entertaining, more informative?  I have several ideas but I am curious to know what you think. 

Thanks for watching and please consider subscribing to the Youtube channel and 'liking' (thumbs up) as many videos as you can - this would be very helpful!

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