Two-Camera Shoot of Rock Concert: EX1's Color Match Perfect

[basspig]

'Was hired to do a 2-camera shoot opening for a Molly Hatchet rock concert last week and this is the first time we did a two-camera shoot with exclusively EX1s.

The setup and shoot was a breeze. All audio was done in-camera, with high quality large diaphragm studio condenser mics to pick up the live sound. My partner shot from the right hand side of the balcony and I shot at FoH mixer location, which is where I placed my recording mics.

I used a cinema matrix with a +20 saturation on both cameras and 4500K white balance, as the lighting on this stage was higher than tungsten.

When we finished shooting the event, packing our kit was a five-minute job and less than an hour after returning to my studio, I had already knocked out a rough A-B cuts-only edit.

The first thing that struck me about the footage was how utterly dead-nuts the color match between cams was. I had virtually nothing to do, color-wise, as they were perfectly in-step with eachother.

The Molly Hatchet designers decorated the stage with intense shades of fuchia, purple, lavendars and deep midnight blues. This contrasted nicely with the performers on-stage. The stage lighting was quite good, and color casts were all but eliminated with proper white lighting on the performers and little bleed from the backdrop gel lighting.

Both cameras have TLCS set to -1 stop, which works to handle the highlights of theater performance nicely, without the iris swings of spotlight mode.

The cinema matrix tends to shift the blues away from cyan toward a more lavendar blue, which further intensified the pretty colors of the stage lighting. However, cinema matrix limits saturation of reds above a certain luminance level, so some of the performers who wore red were a little less than ultra-intense. And that's a good thing for broadcast-ready content.

Once again, the EX1s produced stellar audio, with the aid of good input signals. We got the live concert sound that we wanted without too much ambience, a nice, full bass range, neutral mids and a crystalline high end.

Since my partner had about 5 minutes' experience with the EX1 (he's shot a few concerts with our V1Us prior), he chose to use servo zoom and leave the focus on manual, trained on center stage. I chose manual zoom and manual focus all the way, so I could do snap zooms to focus in on a guitar solo every now and then.

Editing this project was a snap. The inital synch up of tracks was so easy, I just listened for the start of both cameras, did a rough lineup, then nudged one camera downstream until the echo completely went away. The amazing thing is that synch was still dead nuts on at the end of a set, all the way until we stopped the cameras. Both EX1s remained in lock step, to the frame, the whole way through. Amazing.

I did my basic A-B editing in Premiere CS3 using the multicam editor and it was a breeze. A little touch up of timing of cuts with the rolling edit tool and the concert looks fantastic. I can remember this taking a week to accomplish in HDV with all the capture, tape dropout troubleshooting and so on. With XDCam, it was copy and get to editing and everything just worked.

[radar]

Thanks for sharing.

[basspig]

I'm working on the motion menus for the DVD video this evening, and I got creative and daring:

The backdrop was a gradient of fuscia/lavendar colors--not impossible to key, but not not very good either--in fact, anyone would say I was crazy to even THINK to try and pull a key.. but I did make the attempt, and found surprisingly promising results.

Winding back a few hours, I had a brainstorm while doing a boring activity unrelated to my profession: I visualized taking the wood backdrop with the xylopyrographicly burned in logo of the band's name that's being used for the DVD case artwork, and dropping that in as a back layer in an AfterEffects and dropping in the keyed band members on another layer in 3D space, in front of the backdrop, also in 3D space. A few text elements were added in 3D space and a camera was animated, coming around from the upper left and swinging around to stage center, head on.

The effect works pretty darned well! I was even able to have the band members and their instruments cast shadows on the backdrop with the logo--fully-animated! The effect looks like a jib crane shot with the camera hovering over stage right, then coming around to stage center and backing into the audience. Considering that the band was not filmed against a proper green screen, but just a rippling, blowing in the air currents sheet lit unevenly by various gelled lights, it is incredulous that I was able to pull any kind of a key at all.

The cleanness of the EX1's footage made possible some hitherto thought-impossible tricks, and I'm creating one heck of a motion menu design for this DVD as a result!

[radar]

You gonna post some clips?

[basspig]

Eventually, but a lot of what I'm involved in is strictly locked down (copyrights) by the shows'/bands' promoters. I'm just getting the finished DVDs into the hands of the client today, just 6 days after the event. A new world record for me, thanks to XDCam's remarkable workflow.

I think I'm going to post that 3D DVD menu design on XR in a few days. That alone was a work of art. Even my wife, who is very critical of my work, liked it.

[basspig]

The Title Menu for the DVD is online now:

http://exposureroom.com/ (http://exposureroom.com/)wwmenu

This is a rather cool-looking menu design and was the product of daring to try something that the EX1 made possible.

[LighthouseMedia]

You would seriously consider that to be a good clean key?? Not busting your chops bro but that was a very poor key. Tons of fringing on the edges, semi transparent punch outs on talent and objects, loads of dancing noise and un-keyed shadows in the BG. The Guys shirt on the end is almost completely gone...

[Stevet]

Not busting your chops bro but that was a very poor key. .

LOL..
Good one.

I don't recall reading he thought it was an awesome key. I read "it is incredulous that I was able to pull any kind of a key at all."

[basspig]

Exactly as Stevet said. This was not a keyable background. It was anything but a flat color. In fact it had a shadow from the Molly Hatchet banner that was flown just above the performers' heads. That's the junk you see in the upper right. I didn't feel like spending an evening rotoscoping it, but that would be the traditional approach to this situation if a key HAD to be pulled.

The background was lit by gelled lamps in hues from blue to lavendar. There were ripples and shadows and the backdrop was fluttering a bit from HVAC air movement. Not a keyable situation. Soon, I will put up some clips of the actual video that the key was pulled from and you will see how absurd it is to even try to pull a key. ;)

[JTP22]

Just curious about workflow. How many cards in each camera and were you able to hot swap and keep on shooting? Doing a live event soon with 3 EX1's and total show is about 2 hrs. total. beside 2 16 gigs cards in each camera do I have any other options?

James

[Stevet]

Yes,
Buy two Kensington Expresscard 7-in-1 adaptors and two 16GB SanDisk Ultra II 15MB/s SDHC cards. The total cost for both adaptors and both SDHC cards is around $200 USD!
You will be able to capture any HQ mode.

OR,
Wait for the compatibility response of the new soon to be released SanDisk 32GB Ultra II 15MB/s SDHC cards. These only cost $150 USD each!
So for about $370 USD, you will have in your EX 64GB for event work.
That's over 200 minutes of HQ mode capture time.

Note: The EX1 needs software version 1.1
The EX3 works out of the box.

The 32GB Ultra II is soon to be released, so it has not been confirmed to work with the EX.
Since it owns the same specs as their 16GB Ultra II 15MB/s card, I'm willing to bet it will.

The only downfall of the Kensington adapter / SDHC card is the EX1 memory door can not close due to the SDHC card sticks out about 2 to 3mm.
The EX3 door will close though.

Having said that, when using the EX1 or EX3 with Sony's new PHU-60K Video capture external drive, the door can't close either.
Also, the PHU-60K has not had positive reviews. It's been having memory restore errors.

[Danielisnotadrummer]

The downfall is, the ex1

[JTP22]

Thanks that is an awesome solution. So the adapters with the cards will be able to capture in HQ!!! Holy crap this solves so many logistic issues. Thanks a million.

[Stevet]

Yes, this is a real saving grace for event work. We are waiting on the Ultra II 32GB 15MB/s SDHC cards to be released (any day now).

They have the same specs as their 16GB cards and "should" also work.

You can have 64GB over 210 minutes of HQ mode footage with no drive dangling off your camera.

[JTP22]

Don't you think that this adds some leverage for us average Joe's with limited resources to bring the price of the SxS cards down? Just curious though, Can one swap cards in the EX1 without interrupting recording?

[Stevet]

Well first of all, the EX1 needs to have the latest 1.1 sofware.

The expresscards are just like the SxS cards, you can hot swap them.
In fact, you can leave the expresscard adaptor in the EX and just pop out the SDHC card.

As for leverage, I'm not really sure. First of all, more companies are starting to go with SxS cards (JVC). They are extemely fast, and allow the EX to capture overcrank.

You will still need an SxS card for S&Q mode overcrack (slo-mo effects).

[basspig]

Finally uploaded some actual concert footage:

Whitewood Band opening for Molly Hatchet (http://exposureroom.com/members/Basspig.aspx/assets/2895c4f63ca340f8aee4ce7287cda729/)

2 EX1s, camera audio with ext studio condenser mics.

[PerroneFord]

Wow... just wow. Even more impressive than the video, is the AUDIO! What mics were you using?

[Carl Marxx]

Well first of all, the EX1 needs to have the latest 1.1 sofware.

The expresscards are just like the SxS cards, you can hot swap them.
In fact, you can leave the expresscard adaptor in the EX and just pop out the SDHC card.

As for leverage, I'm not really sure. First of all, more companies are starting to go with SxS cards (JVC). They are extemely fast, and allow the EX to capture overcrank.

You will still need an SxS card for S&Q mode overcrack (slo-mo effects).

The SxS express memory can crank to 60fps, the SDHC cards can't. The upgrade version must be 1.10 to see all memory cards that work; ver. 1.11 is the latest -- Carl

[basspig]

Wow... just wow. Even more impressive than the video, is the AUDIO! What mics were you using?


Professional stage lighting really makes a difference!

I used a pair of Behringer B-1s in an ORTF configuration.

The PA system was one of the better ones I've heard, though I did analyze the spectrum and apply some adjustments to bring up a dark upper end in the vocals and bring out the cymbals more. (Back of the theater, you get less highs.)

And I have to congratulate you for noticing the audio. All too often, video and cinematographers seem to think of it as unimportant afterthought. I'm shattering the old preconceived notions that camera audio has to be unusable. This is why I complained about the V1U. This is why I rave about the EX1. :)

[EIREHotspur]

How did I miss this thread?

Great job on this one and love the motion menu.
I thought it was a good key.....creative licence is allowed as perfection is hard to achieve with such an effect.

Lighting was great at that venu......gives me good pointers.

Of course a second EX3 would help.

How did you communicate with your second camera guy to sync zooms and wide shots when the other camera was covering?

Great audio....your right about audio being treated as a long way back second.
Whats your opinion of Seinheisser Camera Mics of any kind?

[basspig]

Now that I have a piece of the actual concert footage up on XR, you can appreciate what was necessary to pull that key for the menu. :)

Communication? We had to forego that. Ethan and I discussed strategy beforehand, noting that each of us would be prioritizing certain shots and framing. The rest falls into the category "great minds think alike". :)

That audio, at this budget point for the production, was only possible thanks to the EX1. It would have cost a LOT more if I had to do separate audio recording and synch it in post.

I've no real opinion on Sennheiser mics. I've used them in broadcast studios. They have their uses. Frankly, I feel that sound capture for film is an area that is somewhat lacking, both in techniques and in the types of equipment used. Good audio is not in the brand of mic you use--it's in how YOU use the mic.