Concert shot with HD100
 

Here is a page featuring some performance videos I shot about a month or so ago.

violent femmes
better than ezra
carbon leaf

http://www.kinziebenefitconcerts.com/video.htm

some details - it was shot with one camera, the violent femmes where VERY restrictive about what could be shot, front of the stage only, and killed my board feed, The other two bands were quite co-operative, and it shows, board feed, shoot whatever. Due to restrictions of the bands, you can't see the full length cuts, sorry you only get a minute or so.
Personally the Carbon Leaf video came out best I think, so enjoy...

Steve Oakley

OMG.....

I saw the Femmes back in '83. They were playing this dump down in Indiana just before their first album came out (it was vinyl back then).

Where in Indiana? Nowhere north of Indy, right?

No, it was south of Indy, but just south of Indy. Maybe Greenwood or off Indiana 37 somewhere. It was some local joint I'd never been to before. My buddie Dave saw them the night before and raved about it so we all went down to check them out. The place was packed (and jumping).

Coulda fooled me, it took a closer look at some of the cuts to figure out you were actually taking footage out of its original context, though some of the mismatches were pretty obvious. Well done though.

Audio could use work though. Even if your board feed is mono mix it into both channels so we're not just hearing it from one speaker.

Other HUGE thing to be aware of is that you should NEVER take a board feed clean and use that as your only sound. Always record some kind of ambience, whether from your camera mic or from some external condensers on boom stands (aka bootlegger's mics). This is because the board mix is designed to sound good when played through the FOH speakers in that particular space. By taking it clean, you're taking that space out of the sound and you just hear everything close miced, which sounds incredibly unnatural. You have to add the space back into the sound by recording with an external mic in order to make it sound natural.

The other issue is the audio-visual mismatch. You see the action taking place in this huge space, with a crowd cheering and whatnot, but all you hear is close mics with very little ambience.

Remember, audio is half of video production, don't neglect it.

what settings where used on these shoots?

I used the TC3 settings, but backed off on all the matrix settings one point because I've found that primary reds and blues will just totally saturate leaving no sublety in color whatsoever. I'm actually planning to do some tests and back of one more point I think, otherwise 720P30

Steve Oakley

Very nice images, what settings and what filters please I realy like it.

ok, if you take apart anything, you'll find things. take apart even a big hollywood film and you'll find problems. with this sort of thing, being done one camera, its not going to be perfect. only way you can do that is with multiple cameras. what counts is if it works while it goes by in realtime which it does. No one just watching this play has really picked any serious offenders up where they stopped and pointed it out.Go watch some music videos and scrutinuze them... then you can have lots of fun finding all the mistakes and mismatches

[QUOTE=Audio could use work though. Even if your board feed is mono mix it into both channels so we're not just hearing it from one speaker.[/QUOTE]
the audio is fine. it is a stereo mix so if you are hearing one channel, its on your end. I took the board feed, did some serious work on it because of noise in it, brought the bass up a quite a bit, and mixed in some camera mic. The board feed was also processed through a stereo expander filter to widen it out a bit. I really got a less than great feed, but when you aren't doing a full shoot, you get what get.
This is really a matter of taste. I've been doing concerts for over 15 years in places like madison square garden,nausau colesium and lincoln center and prefer a mainly board feed mix with some ambience mixed in. I really hate overly ambeint mixes because you can't really hear the quality of whats being played.

[QUOTE=Other HUGE thing to be aware of is that you should NEVER take a board feed clean and use that as your only sound. Always record some kind of ambience, whether from your camera mic or from some external condensers on boom stands (aka bootlegger's mics). This is because the board mix is designed to sound good when played through the FOH speakers in that particular space. By taking it clean, you're taking that space out of the sound and you just hear everything close miced, which sounds incredibly unnatural. You have to add the space back into the sound by recording with an external mic in order to make it sound natural.[/QUOTE]

again, this is a matter of *taste*. you're not telling me anything I don't know and haven't done many times. what you are *assuming* is that it was possible. what you don't know is that I got this shoot a day or two before the event, is was done for very little, and I had no opurtunity to talk to the sound people about getting what I really like, a split track feed into a 8 or 16 track recorder for a full mix in post which I have done on big budget projects. there was no budget or time to make that happen. would a audience mic of been nice, sure, but having to be totally mobile, that wasn't an option.One channel to the camera was its own mic, the other was a board feed. if the HD100 had 4 channels in, I would of set two wireless ambient mics as well, but the Hd100 can't do this. I did not have some one else to man the seperate recorder either.

all that said, there some live mic in there, but it did not really enhance the mix, nor did I have time or budget to remix this with a lot of additional crowd, or some tricks with the board feed.

its VERY easy to say what some one else "should of done" but before you do, you should perhaps consider that what happened happened for specific reasons rather than some lack of knowledge and experience. if they wanted to drop me some serious $, I would of gotten and used a much fancier audio setup, but since that didn't happen, it didn't happen and what I got is ok. if your tastes are for very live ambient mixes, thats nice, its not mine nor my clients who are ( not in the case ) several national networks.

so with that said, lets see & hear something of yours shot one camera live and edited like this.

Steve Oakley

no filters in shooting, TC3 with matrix reduced 1 point on all settings. color matching was done in FCP with the 3 way CC. on a few shots some secondary correction was done, and in one shot the natural lens flare had some additional flare tracked in to cover up some vertical smear from getting the sun directly in the shot. a couple of shots where stabilized, and in on shot some audience was cloned to fill up an empty area - if you can find it :) all of that work was done in combustion.

Steve Oakley

That was actually a compliment. The bits you took out of their original context were so well hidden it took a second look to figure them out.

In the quicktime video of Better Than Ezra, it starts with the crowd in both channels, then the board feed starts up in the right channel, then the crowd abruptly disappears, leaving just the board mix on the right side. It's definitely not on my end, I use this rig to record and mix audio.

In this business there are many thousands of people who can say things like "I've shot in X huge venue" or "I've shot for X huge network." It's not all that impressive to say you've done either without many more specifics. Even I can tell people things like "I've shot sporting events at the XCel Center and the Metrodome" or "I've worked on nationally televised network sports coverage" when if you look at where I actually am in the industry, I've still got a long way to go up.

It's one thing to have a clean mix, it's another thing for it to be overly clean to the point where it sounds unnatural. A concert is meant to sound like what the sound engineer is hearing at the FOH mixing console, and he's not hearing the straight board mix, he's hearing it colored by the speakers, the space of the venue, the sound of the crowd etc. The straight board mix isn't even supposed to be heard by anyone. In my view concert audio for video production should start from a mic(s) at the FOH position then add board feeds to enhance that, not the other way around. It's really not about being super-clean so you can hear every note, if you do that it looks more like a music video than a concert. A concert's really about the overall experience of being in a crowd and having a good time. My whole philosophy on video production is to bring the viewer into wherever you're shooting, and it's the little audio cues that really sell that.

Depending on how long one "unit" (tape, hard drive, whatever) of audio storage will last you, a quick level set at sound check and leaving it rolling works pretty well for me.

The thing is I simply don't do that. If I'm shooting a concert, I'm cutting it live with at least three camera operators that I'm talking to. My main gig is shooting sports, and while I'll sometimes go out to a game with a single camera, in the final product I'll be showing highlights, not trying to make it look like a live sports broadcast. IMHO that's probably what you should have done here, create more of a promotional video of the event using highlights of the event instead of trying to make it look like a concert shot live. Heck, the super-clean musical track would've made sense there, since it would've really been more of a music video than live event coverage.

I was just discussing the color reproduction of the HD-100 with a producer about 20 minutes ago. He was talking about how the HD-100 was more muted compared to other HDV cameras and I was trying to find an example where someone didn't filter (either in-camera, on-lens or post) the heck out of the image. Even my footage is fooled around with somehow. And sitting here on my other computer, in the same room, was this thread hidden by the energy saver settings. He left before I saw this.

Great clean look.

Not to belabor the audio feed issue but....

I find live concert feeds to be risky at best. Unless there is a person specifically mixing for stereo, the mix is usually too dry or too hot with a particular input.

In my experience, the on-camera mike solution is workable in closed settings. An open air concert is near impossible except if the camera is somewhere in the center of the audience. On stage the audio is just too eccentric to be useful.

The last big live concert I did, we used the room sound to make a multi-camera switch and when the board audio was finally mixed and "sweetened" (for the CD) we dropped the track on. Sounds like a snap, right? Well, we discovered that the sweetening included non existant instruments and one song with extra choruses that were apparently forgotten during the concert. Plus a whole contingent of whoops and "Oh yeahs" from the lead singer that didn't happen in the concert. That took some interesting editing to fix.

Did the musicians perform to a click in their live performance? Otherwise it must've been killer to try to sync up.

Oh, and a group of musicians will never all simultaneously "forget" an arrangement on stage. They probably consciously changed the arrangement some time between when they originally recorded it and when they performed it.

In the quicktime video of Better Than Ezra, it starts with the crowd in both channels, then the board feed starts up in the right channel, then the crowd abruptly disappears, leaving just the board mix on the right side. It's definitely not on my end, I use this rig to record and mix audio.
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ok, you should of said this in the first place. As I read your original post, it read like an entire channel was missing. So a mistake happened, I'll go fix this as it should not of gone out the door that way, but such is life.
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In this business there are many thousands of people who can say things like "I've shot in X huge venue" or "I've shot for X huge network." It's not all that impressive to say you've done either without many more specifics. Even I can tell people things like "I've shot sporting events at the XCel Center and the Metrodome" or "I've worked on nationally televised network sports coverage" when if you look at where I actually am in the industry, I've still got a long way to go up.
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not a poser. I'm not some guy who delivered tapes to the dub house and said I the worked on "THE BIG PICTURE"

here's a link of me directing a 8 camera shoot in a truck, a bit old to but just the same... and a promo for the show which I had nothing to do with, but if you know reggea, you know who these people are. just happened to have these old clips around.

http://71.98.60.159/video/truck2.mov

http://71.98.60.159/video/milenium.mov

another reggea show I worked on several years in a row, paramount theator, MSG. I was 1st AD/ tech supervisor

http://71.98.60.159/video/paramount.mov

I probably have more around, but I hope you'd get the point

if I have to name some names, CBS, ABC, FOX, ESPN, MTV. real on air credits for real work, just done a lot of stuff.

I've shot interviews with over 200 celebs in music. let me name names, mariah, puffy, method man, redman,chick corea,whitney,herbie man,santana,donald trump,patti labelle, and on and on. I've cut peices on barry manilow ( no jokes !), david copperfeild,rita rudner,penn & teller,julie andrews, ect. Tv shows, ever heard of 60 minutes ? amongst others

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It's one thing to have a clean mix, it's another thing for it to be overly clean to the point where it sounds unnatural.
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and thats YOUR opinion, and thats fine, but its not mine,nor is its gospel.
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Depending on how long one "unit" (tape, hard drive, whatever) of audio storage will last you, a quick level set at sound check and leaving it rolling works pretty well for me.

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well without some compression, it doesn't work for me, levels can be all over the place, and moot point, because they way it worked was the way it worked. anyone can armchair quarterback after the games been played.

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The thing is I simply don't do that. If I'm shooting a concert, I'm cutting it live with at least three camera operators that I'm talking to.
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intercoms are totally useless at any rock/hiphop/reggea event, if you 've ever really done a major concert event, you'd know that

and reality check here, I did not have the the opportunity to have more than one camera, no budget, no time, so what could of been done is irrelavent. so sure I would of had 6-8 cams, but not this time.
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Steve Oakley

Same here William, We always pull the discrete channel feeds and then do the mix in post production and never worry about the live mix other than ambient from the camera mics. It's a completely separate process (audio) and we have a mobile DAW for concerts/clubs specifically (10 channel).

@ S. Oakley, Please don't take the criticism so hard. Stephan Ahonen pointed out some good criticism that can help focus with future projects. I am not a fan of the shaky camera work. Have you considered a steadycam or some way to deshake the results in post? That would polish the video as well.

S.Noe

comments are fine if they are objective, but do you know what pushed my button ? the very bad assumption that I :

1. had the resources availbable to do something better and didn't because of lack of knowledge and experiance. this in particular really got me,

2. that I didn't know better, and never had done better

3. that all the bands would provide co-operation to do something, one didn't, they killed the board feed. the camera mic sound is not great because when the camera moves, the sound changes dramtically. the GTR player had his amp on stage in front of him, so when I shot him, them the gtr came up significantly. weird setup, but thats how it happened. so much for the great sound of a camera mic.

4. that something can't be different and it has to meet some standard of taste that may not be everyone's regardless of the peice itself being good bad or indifferent. the attitude was that if you don't do something according to some standard, its not really very good. if all the world throught this way nothing innovative would happen because if you didn't do something "standard" it was not really good. unfortunatley, its also this same standards attitude that permiates LA, and look at the assembly line of flops they have been turning out because of it. Time to do something different.This isn't about the audio being bad ( noisey, low, clipped, ect. ) but being *different* than some folks are used to.


you know it would of been perfectly fine to say you like a more live mix. no problem, but BY INTENT I was not going that way. This was intended to be much more like a music video than a concert per se... mixing genre's, sure, why not. experiment and see what works, what doesn't. who says a concert has to be a concert - I put in a few shots that had nothing to do with the actual performance but worked anyway, like a music video. so maybe I am defining a new format.

as for the "shaky" camera and why not use a steadicam, please go read #1 again, I INTENTIONALLY went for a shaky look, by design. I knew I could not have these smooth steady shots because of what I had to work with, not much. I wanted a woodstock rough moving camera look *by design*. I could of dropped a tripod down in front, nice and steady and boring. much more limited in shots I could get than by doing it HH and keeping it moving. if I had sat the camera down on a tripod, the comments would of been that it should of been more moving and dynamic.


and since I've posted a few clips other clips, I haven't seen anyone else post clips of any video they've shot under the same circumstances and done better, the same, or worse, so hey fair is fair, I showed you mine, now you can show me yours :)

Steve Oakley

comments are fine if they are objective, but do you know what pushed my button ? the very bad assumption that I :

1. had the resources availbable to do something better and didn't because of lack of knowledge and experiance. this in particular really got me,

2. that I didn't know better, and never had done better

3. that all the bands would provide co-operation to do something, one didn't, they killed the board feed. the camera mic sound is not great because when the camera moves, the sound changes dramtically. the GTR player had his amp on stage in front of him, so when I shot him, them the gtr came up significantly. weird setup, but thats how it happened. so much for the great sound of a camera mic.

4. that something can't be different and it has to meet some standard of taste that may not be everyone's regardless of the peice itself being good bad or indifferent. the attitude was that if you don't do something according to some standard, its not really very good. if all the world throught this way nothing innovative would happen because if you didn't do something "standard" it was not really good. unfortunatley, its also this same standards attitude that permiates LA, and look at the assembly line of flops they have been turning out because of it. Time to do something different.This isn't about the audio being bad ( noisey, low, clipped, ect. ) but being *different* than some folks are used to.


you know it would of been perfectly fine to say you like a more live mix. no problem, but BY INTENT I was not going that way. This was intended to be much more like a music video than a concert per se... mixing genre's, sure, why not. experiment and see what works, what doesn't. who says a concert has to be a concert - I put in a few shots that had nothing to do with the actual performance but worked anyway, like a music video. so maybe I am defining a new format.

as for the "shaky" camera and why not use a steadicam, please go read #1 again, I INTENTIONALLY went for a shaky look, by design. I knew I could not have these smooth steady shots because of what I had to work with, not much. I wanted a woodstock rough moving camera look *by design*. I could of dropped a tripod down in front, nice and steady and boring. much more limited in shots I could get than by doing it HH and keeping it moving. if I had sat the camera down on a tripod, the comments would of been that it should of been more moving and dynamic.


and since I've posted a few clips other clips, I haven't seen anyone else post clips of any video they've shot under the same circumstances and done better, the same, or worse, so hey fair is fair, I showed you mine, now you can show me yours :)

Steve Oakley

Maybe critiques were stated in a way that seemed offensive, but I don't think anyone meant anything personal. Rather I think the comments are to make the production more polished.

Anyway, it's hard to believe the Femmes are still drawing a crowd. What was the gate at that show?

I really didn't mean to offend. Unfortunately, the internet is such that you can read things in that were never really there in the first place. Boo for the internet.

I think the "shaky" camera looked fine. Footage can't be super-stable all the time, especially under live event constraints, a tripod limits your mobility far too much. Plus, the handheld feel really gives a nice "live" dynamic to the image. I know a guy who worked with a producer who had him shoot a ton of interviews handheld because he wanted that feel to it. Absolutely wrecked the cameraman's shoulder.

http://www.davidclark.com/ProAudio/

I first heard about these from a guy who shoots NASCAR, they're the same headsets that pilots in small planes use to hear ATC, only with plugs for intercom systems. Very nice at cutting out noise, you can hear the director anywhere.

A TV show that really could have used some professional camera people was NYPD Blue. No wonder it got cancelled. Apparently it was pretty low budget, though, since they had to use just one camera panning back and forth to cut down on editing time of making cuts to different shots.

There are a lot of shows on air now that have a lot of footage that is blown out and with a video-color smeary look. I think one of them is something called CSI. But then, since they didn't have enough money to pay for big-name actors, they probably didn't have the budget for good cameras and crew, either.

I personally think the only problem with the concert video in this thread is the subject. If it were me, I would have insisted on some hot talent, or I wouldn't have taken a camera out of the bag. Regarding the audio in the video, true professional singers, like Britney and Simpson, don't try to sing live, they lip synch, and then you can use the audio CD for the track and mix it with some totally professional Sit-Com audience track.

I'll assume your being facitous with that comment.... if you ever said that in front of chaka kahn whom I shot a few years ago, she would of knocked you senseless for that one, serious or not. Real proffessional singers can and do really sing every gig. I've worked with a lot of them. I got to work on a Gladys Knight package and she still sings, and she's been at it for a long long time and still does a great fun show. no one would ever accuse britney or simpson as being real singers, just products of a label marketing machine. They have to lip sync because they are not good singers and are more concerned with their stage show & dancing than vocal performance.

Steve Oakley

thanks for that. every truck or fly pack I've had has always had the usual clearcoms & headsets. so I'll spec in on my next concert package


Steve Oakley

Yes... I thought the "sit-com audience track" would have given it away, if Britney and Simpson didn't.

The back-up musicians were all hired for the event and were expected to sing the choruses. The lead singer doesn't travel with a regular band, he's a famous musician from the sixties who shall remain nameless in this discussion. Apparently the sheet music wasn't clear or it was a case of someone forgot to sing and the other musicians cut themselves off since no-one was really familiar with the arrangement. Who knows, but there it was, shots of silent musicians and the lead looking around with a smile at everyone. At the concert it just looks like a conscious decision to not sing and have a little music play the chorus. With the corrected track, it's very strange.

Sync isn't very hard, I find a distinctive spot on the audio waveform, a drum hit for example, and line up the tracks. A little frame shift fixes it. The audio tracks were the same length so there was no sync drift as the songs progressed. The audio was recorded in a 24 track audio truck outside the club. My cameras were sync locked.

We would mix into the club sound only when there was a piece of audio that didn't exist on the CD such as during a bit of talk in between songs. It worked very well. The DVD was released by a large distributor.

Yes...
Agreed!

The last concert we shot, we stold direct signals and fed them into a multitrack recorder. From here, "the world is at your finger tips" -
you can fully mix, add all the processing you wish and master it.

If available, you can use a splitter snake to steal the signals direct from the talent to your own mixer / multi-track recorder.
Unfortunately, if the band is already using a splitter snake, it is usually used for the stage foldback mix.

For additional live crowd noise, you can use your camera mic for between songs.

Ewww, that explains it.

As for sync, you're lucky the band was playing to a metronome in this case. If they weren't, you would have never been able to pull that off because their tempo wouldn't have been exactly the same as the recording.

There's a lot of presuppostion of Steve's credentials and experience going on in this thread.

I'm sure if he had a choice in the matter, or a budget to speak of, he would have elected for a more optimum setup, including additional cameras. If you were shooting this with a single camera (whatever the reason), do you think you'd have time to worry about setting sticks down at each spot you've chosen to get cutaway angles? Think of the scrambling that he must have been doing to cover it as well as he did... Was there really room in the budget for a Steadicam?

I don't believe he submitted it as an example of his best work - since I've seen some of his work (which did have a full crew and budget, usually). It holds together pretty well given the circumstances, and I'd doubt that anyone besides a seasoned pro would have gotten this far with it in post or otherwise.

In any case, I can definitely see how Steve interpreted the criticisms shared here as a bit patronizing. In this business, good criticism accounts for elements out of the producer's control. You guys didn't do that.

It's always why didn't this happen or why that didn't happen but that's what most video professions have to deal with. 70% of my career in this business has been working around some sort of problem, either inherent in the project or something that suddenly pops up. The problems could be budgets, personality conflicts, faulty equipment, vanishing money, etc.

I was directing the videotaping of a political roundtable for distribution on PBS a couple of months ago at a prestigious university auditorium. Five minutes before we were scheduled to start water stars pouring down from the ceiling, dead center of the stage, in front of the moderator. The air conditioning system was full of condensation and this was apparently where it leaks out regularly! We waited until the downpour stopped but it kept dripping and time was running out, the discussion had to start. There was a very restless live audience. I determined that the drip was invisible on the long shot and the other cameras were repositioned so that the drip didn't interfered with the panel guests. This sort of ruined the background behind the guests but there was no alternative. The last problem was the sound of water dropping thirty feet onto the stage. The university staff found some gym towels which absorbed the sound but unfortunately the towels were pure white and the stage 80% grey. So I couldn't see the drip on the wide shot but there was a pile of towels dead center of the shot. I thought that I would fix it with After Effects during the edit process but right after we finished shooting the program producer tells me that there was a change in the broadcast schedule and I would have to edit the event in a few days instead of the agreed upon two weeks. So I did what I would have done in the old linear edit days, I found wide shots from later in the evening where you absolutely couldn't see the mouths clearly (the towels had been removed at this point) and replaced all the towel shots. I can see the edits but the host and the producer actually forgot that the towels were ever on stage. Was the show a success? It's not going on my reel but people were captivated by the discussion so in that way it was a success.

As a professional I can frequently see fixes and cover ups that the lay viewer couldn't care less about. For me that's the real question, is the finished product effective for the intended audience? Is the documentary informative without putting people to sleep? Is a filmed concert delivering the live experience of the event? Is the comedy actually funny?

The short clips that started this thread gave me a great feel for the event depicted. They are news clips of sorts. Yes, I could see that the edits were from different times but most people would be very happy with those clips and I would have probably edited something very similar given the same footage.

I think that it depends on whether or not the documentary is acting as an important historical document. Perhaps the greatest documentary ever made was the WORLD AT WAR series from BBC. That show did the painstaking research not only to find war footage, but actual footage from the actual battles (ie- not just footage from a random WWII battle). That sort of work is needed for something as serious as WWII.

But for a concert, or animal documentary, it's not only fine to 'fudge' a few scenes, but also to more or less stage them - just about every animal documentary ever made is guilty of this 'sin' in one way or another, particularly the older ones. Television interviews having been doing this for years of course (ie - taking/editing in reaction shots out of context to deliever a greater impact).

Doing it for political debates (neat story by the way) I think is a bit of a grey area, but then again it depends on exactly who's paying the bills and what they want. Obviously the people in your story didn't come to talk about the (indoor) weather!

But what if you had a chance to go back in time to shoot the Gettysburg Address? Would you want to edit around the gaffes, or show the whole thing? Or perhaps a better analogy, would you shoot all of Lincoln's re-election campaign speeches and edit them together for effect, or shoot one and let it ride?

Interesting thread - thanks for the footage!

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com

In the case of a political debate (as opposed to a political ad) I think to distort what the candidates say is just dishonest, and those responsible should pay, possibly with there jobs (as they do in rare cases, such as the car rolling over or the Rather debacle.)

On the other hand, I think Verité can be a most powerful form, and the upcoming mini-series that will be broadcast September 10 and 11 (both in the U.S. and in England) is a case in point. By all accounts, the show is incredible, and by far the best of anything done on 9-11 and/or terrorism to date.

As I said, "the intended audience". The BBC was not making that show for kids playing with GI Joe or someone looking for John Wayne gung-ho. The mistake is averaging everything to a similar standard. Styles change, whch is great, but there seems to be a trend to do everything in a similar style from news to drama.

Talk about obvious (to me at least)! I don't know how many recent animal documentaries about "Lulu" the leopard or some other animal character that is clearly footage of several animals clipped together to create the "lifestory".

Yikes, what a question! Would he have ever been allowed to run if television was around?

That's a whole other question! I guess the basic theme of this thread is you have to do the best you can w/ the tools and time available. I think Steve did a great job w/ what he had - which is a good lesson at any time.

john
evilgeniusentertainment.com