PrintableCharts

TWO-CAMERA SPEAKER SETUP

the lighting triangle and where each of the 2 cameras stands · the floor plan from above

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

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Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
code · beginners · memo · study

Source: Herbert Zettl, Television Production Handbook, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, 1976 — chapter 6 on lighting and chapter 10 on editing. The 45-degree angle, the 1 : 1 : ½ ratio and the table of instruments come from there; positions are named by the clock, as the source names them.

THE GAP BEHIND THE SPEAKER IS THE ONE MEASUREMENT ON THIS PLAN THAT REALLY COUNTS

On a floor plan the distance from the speaker to the backdrop looks like a matter of taste. It is in fact what decides whether the back light is a back light at all: move the person close to the wall and the instrument has to be tilted steeply down, and light falling from behind at too steep an angle stops revealing the contour and simply over-brightens the top of the head. The source calls that top light.

Which is where the handbook’s advice about furniture comes from: tables, chairs and anything people sit on should be moved away from the walls as far towards the centre of the set as possible. Not for the composition. For the light.

There is a second reason, about the instrument rather than the picture: the 1976 edition notes that an extreme downward tilt keeps the heat from ventilating properly and the lamp fails because of it. Those instruments were tungsten; the rule about top light does not depend on that and holds today.

On the sheet

  • Source: Herbert Zettl, Television Production Handbook, 3rd ed., Wadsworth, 1976 — chapter 6 on lighting and chapter 10 on editing. The 45-degree angle, the 1 : 1 : ½ ratio and the table of instruments come from there; positions are named by the clock, as the source names them.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 7 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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