basspig
Veteran
'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.
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.
