Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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.

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

Nice pic for our Oz viewers! ;-)

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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.

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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.

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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!

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

Just got this pic from my friend of his set-up for the AC/DC gig:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...rass/RED-1.jpg
That is some lens! a Hawk 150-450mm T2.8

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

Now I have lens envy!

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

One more for the hardware geeks:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...s/IMG_0201.jpg

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

It's camera porn!!!!

Love it!

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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:



http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799840001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799850001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799860001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799870001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799880001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799890001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799900001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799920001

http://gallery.me.com/nweaver/100534...13062799920001

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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.

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

Great pics and thanks for sharing Nate.

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega Shoot.
 

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.

Re: Duran Duran Super35 mm Mega 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.