Conference Video Glossary: 50 Terms Australian Event Managers Should Know

Conference video quotes are full of jargon that nobody explains. This glossary defines the 50 terms that actually turn up in Australian production quotes, venue contracts and run sheets, grouped by where you will meet them. If you only read one entry, make it audio patch — it is the term that most often decides whether your footage is usable.

Terms are listed in the order they tend to come up in a job, not alphabetically, so related ideas sit together.

Crew and camera terms

Single-op (single operator) — One camera operator covering the event alone. The standard setup for a half-day, single-stream program.

Multi-camera — Two or more cameras running simultaneously, letting an editor cut between a wide shot, a close-up and the audience. It is what makes a recording watchable for more than a few minutes.

Plenary — The main session everyone attends, usually in the largest room. Normally the priority for filming.

Breakout / concurrent session — Smaller parallel sessions. Filming several at once means one crew and camera per room, which is the main driver of cost on multi-stream conferences.

B-roll — Supplementary footage: delegates arriving, networking, the venue, hands on keyboards. It is what an editor cuts away to, and a highlight reel is largely built from it.

ISO recording — Each camera recording its own isolated file, as well as (or instead of) a mixed output. It gives the editor every angle in full rather than only the live cut.

Line cut / vision mix — A single video output switched live between cameras during the event. Fast to deliver, but locked — you cannot change the cut afterwards.

Lectern / podium — The stand a speaker presents from. Worth noting in a brief, because a fixed lectern constrains where cameras can go.

Confidence monitor — The screen facing the stage so a speaker can see their slides without turning around.

Audio terms

Audio patch (or feed) — A direct audio connection from the venue's sound desk to the camera or recorder. Without it, you get a camera microphone recording a PA system in a large room, which is the most common reason conference footage is unusable.

Mult box (press box / press splitter) — A device that splits the room's audio into multiple clean outputs so several crews can each take a feed. Larger venues often require one and may charge for it.

Lavalier (lav / lapel) mic — The small clip-on microphone attached to a speaker's clothing.

Radio mic (wireless) — Any microphone transmitting wirelessly to a receiver, freeing the speaker to move.

Handheld — A hand-held microphone, typical for panels, Q&A and roving audience questions.

XLR — The standard three-pin professional audio connector. If a venue says they can "give you XLR out of the desk", that is the audio patch.

Room tone — A short recording of the empty room's ambient sound, used by editors to smooth cuts.

Q&A capture — Recording audience questions. Easy to forget and very obvious when missing, because the answer makes no sense without the question.

Lighting and vision terms

Key light — The main light on the subject's face. On a dark conference stage, stage lighting rarely does this well on its own.

Colour temperature — How warm or cool a light source is, measured in kelvin. Mixed lighting is why some conference footage looks orange and some looks blue.

White balance — Setting the camera so white looks white under the room's lighting.

Slide sync — Cutting the speaker's presentation slides into the finished video in time with the talk, so viewers see what the room saw. Often the difference between a watchable session recording and a talking head.

Screen capture — Recording the presentation feed directly from the AV system rather than filming the projection screen, which gives a far cleaner result.

SDI / HDMI — The two common professional video cable standards. SDI runs reliably over long distances; HDMI does not.

Livestreaming terms

Encoder — The hardware or software that compresses the live video and sends it to a streaming platform.

RTMP — The long-standing protocol for sending a stream to platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.

SRT — A newer protocol built to survive unstable connections. Increasingly preferred for streaming over cellular.

Bitrate — How much data per second the stream uses. Higher bitrate means better quality and needs more upload bandwidth.

Bonded cellular — A device combining several 4G/5G SIMs into one aggregated connection, used as a primary or backup link where venue internet is unreliable.

Redundancy — Having a second, independent path for anything critical: a backup internet connection, a second recorder, a spare camera. Planned before the event, never improvised on the day.

Latency — The delay between something happening in the room and a remote viewer seeing it.

Simulcast — Streaming to several platforms at once.

Hybrid event — An event run for an in-person audience and a remote audience simultaneously, as opposed to a virtual-only event with no room.

Post-production terms

Topped and tailed — Trimmed to a clean start and finish with branded titles added, but not edited internally. The standard, fast treatment for speaker recordings.

Highlight reel — A short, fast-paced edit capturing the energy of the event, typically 60 seconds to three minutes.

Sizzle reel — Essentially the same thing, usually framed as a promotional piece for the next event.

Speaker reel — A cut-down of one presenter's session, generally given to the speaker to use themselves.

Vox pop — Short, candid interviews with delegates, usually filmed in a corridor or foyer.

Lower third — The name-and-title graphic that appears across the bottom of the screen.

Colour grade — Adjusting colour and contrast across the finished edit so every shot matches.

Proxy — A small, low-resolution copy of footage used to edit quickly before relinking to the full-quality files.

Master — The final full-quality export that all other versions are made from.

Captions, formats and delivery

Burned-in captions (open captions) — Subtitles permanently part of the picture. They cannot be turned off, which is why they suit social video where playback is muted by default.

Closed captions — Subtitles carried as a separate track the viewer can switch on or off, usually supplied as an SRT or VTT file.

SRT file — The common plain-text subtitle format, carrying the caption text and its timings.

Aspect ratio — The shape of the frame. 16:9 is standard landscape, 9:16 is vertical for phones, and 1:1 is square. Deciding early matters, because a vertical crop of a wide stage shot often cuts the speaker out.

Deliverable — Any individual finished file you receive: a session recording, a highlight reel, a social cut.

Raw footage — The original unedited camera files. Large, and worth agreeing on up front whether you get them.

Usage rights — What you are permitted to do with the finished video, and for how long. Worth reading carefully in any quote.

Speaker release — A signed agreement from a presenter covering recording and reuse of their session. Australian forms commonly let the speaker keep copyright while granting the organiser a licence, which differs from typical American agreements.

Archive — Long-term storage of footage after delivery. Ask how long a supplier keeps your material and whether it costs anything to retrieve it later.

Event-industry terms video crews use

PCO (Professional Conference Organiser) — An agency engaged to run a conference end to end. If you are working with a PCO, they usually coordinate suppliers including video.

AV company — The supplier responsible for the room itself: screens, sound, lighting and staging. Distinct from the video crew, who produce content you keep afterwards. The two work alongside each other, and the audio patch is the handover point between them.

Bump-in / bump-out — Setup before the event and pack-down afterwards. Video crews need a confirmed bump-in slot to position cameras, run cable and test audio.

Run sheet — The minute-by-minute schedule of the event. A video crew should be working from the same one as the AV team.

Green room — The private space where speakers wait. Often the best place to film speaker interviews, because it is quiet and they are already there.

Exhibition floor (trade floor) — The exhibitor area. Two thirds of secured Australian association conventions include one, making it routine content that sponsors will often fund.

Delegate — An attendee. The Australian conference sector's standard term, used in preference to "participant".

Using this glossary

If you are briefing a supplier for the first time, the five terms worth getting straight before you sign anything are audio patch, bump-in, deliverables, usage rights and slide sync. Those five cover most of the gap between a quote you understand and one you do not.

For what each of these actually costs, see our pricing page and the cost guide. For how the pieces fit together on the day, read the complete guide to conference filming in Australia, the AV company comparison, or our livestreaming and hybrid events guide. You can also browse conference filming, highlight films and livestreaming, or see where we film across Australia.