Last Saturday (1/17/2015) I was given the opportunity to shoot for Breaking Records for Charities in Lake Elsinore, CA. While I plan on discussing the event at length in a later post, I want to focus on one of my favorite parts of the event, the live music! Below is the video I shot/edited for the band BloodType G.

This was a pretty intense video. Both in the shooting & the actual content of the footage. In this post, I'll go over how I captured and edited the media.

Capture

Capturing this event was challenging. Not in the sense that I didn't have a good vantage point. Far from it! I had the best view from everyone there. I even jumped backstage to get some of the shots! The thing that made it challenging was simply... how they performed. The Male Singer Milad Hashemi is an AMAZING performer. But so is the Guitarist Charles Cook. And so are Elanna, Ethan, and Gustin (Female Singer, Bass Player, and Drummer respectively). My problem was that I only had one camera to shoot with (a borrowed Canon 70D). Meaning I had to jump between capturing each person. What would I have done different? I would have pulled out my camera (my trusty rusty T1i) and set it up somewhere on a tripod and have it take a picture every few seconds (say next to Charles) so that I could get multiple vantage points. Oh well... next time!

As for the shooting style, I wanted to make sure I had at least one entire song from beginning to end recorded for mixing in post (more on that later), and plenty of B-Roll (shots that one puts over the main track, hence the name "B-Roll"). All in all, I shot about 10GB (roughly 20-30 minutes) of footage. Now comes the fun part... Editing!

Editing

As I previously stated, I was shooting with a Canon 70D. My settings were between 1/250-320" shutter, ISO 100-200, and F/5.6 for most of the shots. For stills these are perfect settings. However, for video they're a little off. Why was I shooting at a such high shutter speed? I shot the entire event in 60fps (so I could slow it in post if I wanted to) and I wanted to make sure there was as little motion blur as possible.

In reference to my capturing one full song, I knew that the audio from the RØDE VideoMic I put on top of the camera, while great, would not give me the sound I was looking for. I knew that, in order to get the cleanest audio possible, I would have to get their studio version and sync it to the audio from the performance. Sometimes you can't do this because the live/studio versions are so different from each other. But in this case, they were nearly identical (BloodType G respect level, 15 out of 10). But even with the audio tracks sounding identical, you could run into the issue of making it look/sound like they were lip syncing. Fortunately, I found a way to get around this problem. If you lower the clean audio track's volume, and delay it by one frame (1/24th of a second), it sounds just like the live music and sync's perfectly.

Once I had the audio issue sorted out, the rest of the process was a piece of cake. I simply took the other tracks, slowed them down from 60fps to 24fps, saw which shots looked the coolest and timed their cuts with the music. As for the color (or lack there of), I wanted this video to feel powerful and I thought that a high contrast Black and White achieved that feeling for me. And incase you're wondering, this was edited in Final Cut Pro X. Between this and Adobe Premiere Pro CC (which I use regularly), I prefer FCPX simply because it's easier (for me) to use. I then exported the video as a ProRess 422 Proxy file, then uploaded it to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook etc.

That's it for now! Be sure to come back next week to see the video for/of Breaking Records for Charities and the Behind-the-Scenes look at how I shot it. Take care everyone! :-)

The Intense Music Video for BloodType G

Capture

Editing