Preparations are well under way for a major shoot at a Duran Duran concert in Berlin this week. We will be shooting with Sony SRW9000PL's, Sony F3's, FS100's, VG10's and NEX 5's. The smaller VG10's and NEX cameras will be sent into the audience for crowd POV's and crowd shots. We will have two tracks for cameras laid directly in front of the stage and half way back in the theatre. We have one crew shooting behind the scenes footage including all the prep and rigging and a full in depth video on how we shoot the concert will be produced. Yesterday was spent evaluating some lenses including a monster Canon 800/1600mm lens (see attached photo).
As the shoot progresses I'll be posting updates here, on my blog and twitter.

Nice pic for our Oz viewers! ;-)

Hope Simon's throat is better as he had to cancel Newcastle this week, my friend Peter Johnson did a similar shoot for AC/DC in south america, I think they had around 23 camera's with 18 of them being RED's.

They also cancelled 3 other gigs including Birmingham (yesterday) which was supposed to be our test gig, which is why we ended up with the lens test out in the sunshine instead of in a concert venue. At the moment the gig is still on, but we won't know for sure until Monday evening and we're all due to fly out first thing Tuesday. Hope it goes ahead as we have equipment from all over the place already on route to Berlin, so we have to go to Berlin even if it's just to collect and return all the gear.

I'd love to see the wording of the contracts the powers that be are no going through working out who is going to stand the losses!

Just got this pic from my friend of his set-up for the AC/DC gig:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v62/GaryNattrass/RED-1.jpg
That is some lens! a Hawk 150-450mm T2.8

Now I have lens envy!

One more for the hardware geeks:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v62/GaryNattrass/IMG_0201.jpg

It's camera porn!!!!

Love it!

I have some crazy pics from Green Day. Let me dig.

Alright, so it's real tough to watch a thread about concerts shot on 35mm sized digital cameras without blabbing about my own adventure. Apologies to Allister, I'm not trying to threadjack. I couldn't post much about the job at the time because it was being released in drips and drabs by Comcast and Warner Bros, but now nobody cares and I can go on and on.

These are some pics from a Green Day concert I directed in Oakland, CA almost exactly 2 years ago. It was exciting and definitely cool to be able to say we shot on 11 Reds, but if it was today I wouldn't even think twice about doing it on F3s. Cheaper, lighter, easier post, it goes on and on.

Our camera prep took over Lee Utterbach camera in San Francisco for 2 days+...My Key 1st AC informed me later he did about another 2 days of work, more or less unpaid. We used dang near every Red and modern/semi-modern zoom lens in the bay area that was available to rent, from both LU and Chater Camera in Berkley. Optimo 24-290, Optimo 15-40, Cooke 20-100 (x2), Cooke 25-250, Angenueix 25-250 HR, multiple Red 18-50s, Red 18-85...and I had the benefit of seeing all these lenses compared in great detail in the edit since I was cutting in 1080p.

The 2.5 hour concert, footage from 11 cameras equalled 2.8TB, which we had to back up immediately. I think the DIT/loaders were working until 10-11am the next day, and that was before the 1st backup. Score another for XDCAM.

It was my job after that to get 5 songs edited for broadcast on Comcast within 6 days. My original plan was to make transcodes, but the length of the show shot down that plan and I wound up editing with proxies, and then outputting each song edit in Color, about one a day. Again, while I would love to do such a thing with ProRes on an F3, with such a fast turnaround I'd probably do it with XDCAM if it was today.

DVInfo's own Charles Papert did me a huge favor and bestowed my gig with his steadicam skills, but last minute we were told no steadicam on stage, so he was banished to the ghetto of the front barricade. I still feel badly about that, he did not get to do even close to what he's capable of down there.

One song of the 11 or so that got edited:

Green Day - American Idiot on Vimeo


http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_2895/web.jpg?ver=13062799840001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_2927/web.jpg?ver=13062799850001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_2960/web.jpg?ver=13062799860001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_3076/web.jpg?ver=13062799870001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_3082/web.jpg?ver=13062799880001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_3095/web.jpg?ver=13062799890001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_3115/web.jpg?ver=13062799900001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/DSC_3122/web.jpg?ver=13062799920001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534/IMG_0247/web.jpg?ver=13062799920001

Nate,
Thanks for sharing.
Of course one concert story brings on the next.
If you're ever in the NY area I'll have to show you 'my' GreenDay footage - single EX1 - 2nd row left aisle - directly following the final Broadway performance of the American Idiot musical. Camera mic - lots of energy - crowd is often louder than the band. Kept the camera about a foot over my head for the whole set. Reminded me of going to concerts when I was a kid -- ahh, the good old days.

Great pics and thanks for sharing Nate.

Nice pic Nate, I don't think I've seen that one.

Green Day was my second to last concert shoot as a Steadicam operator (followed by last year's "Glee" show at Radio City).

Below: my Green Day shooting rig. Hours of configuration in prep resulted in a setup weighing half as much as most RED configurations at that time, which was a great boon for the near-continuous shoot.

Nate,

Thanks for the info.

So, to be clear, you would be fine using only the 35Mb 8bit XDCAM EX for a large concert shoot like this? Is that because it was only destined for broadcast? Or would you change your mind and use an external recorder if it was destined for Blu Ray? To me, going from 4k 36 or 42 MegaBYTES per second R3D to 1080 35Mb/s is a very large jump in quality.

Just a funny thought but imagine using 11 F3's with a Gemini on each and the amount of storage space required.

What did you shoot at: 4k 24p or something else and what NLE did you use to edit? Is FCP the only NLE capable of 11+ camera multi-cam editing? I think Avid and Edius are 8 while Premiere is a measly 4 (come on Adobe and help us PPro users).

Man, the logistics must have been a nightmare. Are those 17" Panasonic LCDs in the 3rd to last shot and did you have one for each camera?

Thanks for answering any of my questions.

The Berlin Duran Duran shoot was quite an adventure that twisted and turned this way and that. On the Monday before the shoot we were all sat at home waiting for the go - no-go phone call from the producers. The call came at 9pm, we were go, so first thing Tuesday I was off to the airport with 75kg of kit to fly out to Berlin with the very real threat of either Heathrow airport or Berlin airport getting shut down by Volcanic ash from Iceland. In the end my flight left 20 mins early and the plane was even backing away from the gate well before everyone had taken their seats in a mad dash to get to Berlin before airspace got closed. My self and Den Lennie in the advanced party got into Berlin Ok and spent Tuesday collecting some of the rented and borrowed kit and getting it in to the venue.
However by the Wednesday morning the whole shoot was turning into a serious challenge as Berlin airport was closed by the Ash cloud from the Iceland volcano just as key members of the crew were due to fly in. They ended up going to Dusseldorf and getting the train up to Berlin. In addition some of our rented kit was delayed as well as the stage and rigging crew, so everyone was running behind, frantically trying to source more kit locally. We had 6 F3's, 2 FS100's the SRW9000PL and an EX3. The EX3 was going to be used on the back of a 300mm Cinestyle lens from the back of the venue to get some close up shots that we just could not get with any of the PL mount lenses we had on the 35mm sensor cameras. Long, fast 35mm lenses are few and far between.

Two of the F3's were kitted out with Angenieux Optimo 24-290 T2.8 lenses and Pre-Production Zacuto EVF's. What a gorgeous lens, the EVF's aren't bad either! We could get beautiful mid and close up shots from the venue sides. At the rear of the venue as well as the EX3 we had an F3 with an Angenieux Optimo 15-40 on a track to shoot wide shots of the stage through the crowds. The remaining F3's were to be used with Nikon DSLR lenses in the 75 to 300mm range via MTF adapters (thanks Mike) and a prototype Adaptimax adapter (Thanks Steve). The remaining F3's were going to go on tracks at the front of the stage to pick off close ups of instruments and band members. We also had a pair of Sony MC1P mini-cams but we could not rig these until the stage crew arrived and we weren't expecting them until early on Thursday morning, the day of the shoot. The FS100's would be on stage, hand held and on tracks using prototype Birger mounts and Canon L series lenses.

Then the bombshell dropped. The event was postponed. The lead singer Simon LeBon has been suffering from Laryngitis and he still wasn't well enough to sing. So the remainder of the evening was spent packing all the kit away and rebooking flights and schedules. The concert will now be held on the 8th of June, again in Berlin. I'm going to be flying back to London from Cinegear and a 3D event at Samy's cameras on the 6th, passing through London ( 3 hours between flights) on the 7th where I will pick up my F3 kit and then travel on the Berlin, where we will once again try to complete the shoot. Photo's and more gear porn to follow.

One more note. We were recording to either NanoFlashes at 100 Mb/s of Atamos Ninja's while also recording internally in the cameras.

The pictures below show the F3's getting prep'd and programmed with matching picture profiles and clip numbering prefixes. Plus a couple of shots of one of the F3's with the big optimo zoom fitted. This is a monster of a lens.

Thanks for the blog/pics Alister and sorry to hear after the problems of travel it was cancelled, hope the band and management appreciate all the work involved.

We did a few film shoots in france with them for The Tube in the 80's and they were a pain in the backside to work with then but as time went on several ego driven bands inc Mick and Keef's learned not to upset the Geordies on the film crew as we just didn't tolerate their rock star ways! ;0)

The band are genuinely extremely upset at the cancellations. I think that they are all as keen to get the tour on the road as anyone else. Lets face it these days you can't afford to disappoint your fans and it's live shows where they make their money.

The band always tend to be fine, it's the management that seem to play the funny games for no apparent reason!