Help! - Shooting a Concert with 2 HVX and 2 D90 Cameras

S

sethgonefishing

New member
Hi all,

I'm directing a concert video in a little over a week with 2 HVX200s and 2 D90 cameras. There is little to no budget on this thing (a favor for a friend) and I want to get a feel for the best way to go about syncing these cameras (or closest thing to it). I will have a separate audio recording directly from the house sound mixer. The wild card here are the D90s. Can I just use something like PluralEyes to match them up a later? i plan to shoot all cameras at 720p at 24fps. The media is P2 cards and SD Cards. The output will be DVD and Web.

Any tips on prepping this thing would be greatly appreciated. It is my first live concert shoot.

Thanks!
 
First of all you should consider adding a stereo FOH "ambience" audio recording to mix with the dry desk feed. Just off your wide-shot camera mics will be sufficient.

As long as you have audio of some sort from each camera you will have enough to sync the four tracks. Depending on the type of music, you should be able to easily match a few peaks (like the start of a piece) on your editing timeline without having to use any other software.

Depending on what you are using to record the main audio, you will probably have to re-sync every few minutes using the same method and yes, while time-consuming in the first instance, once all the tracks are locked you're in business.

Nothing much more to say really, except good luck with it.
 
Thanks, Ceejay. Ambient in the mix is a great call.

Does anyone know how the D90s will hold up against the HVX? How should I transcode the DVCPRO and MJPEG files???
 
I've incorporated D90 concert footage with HVX footage to good effect. PluralEyes helps a lot when it comes to syncing-up four minute clips from the D90 spread out over the course of a song.
Before that came out, we used a slate with a cheap digital timer taped to the front and a wireless lav on the back transmitting the "click" to a spare track on the multitrack audio. That way, the D90 operator could just carry it around and discretely re-slate any time he started a clip recording. Start the digital timer at the same time as the main audio recorder. Then, when you see a D90 clip that starts with the digital timer at, say 18:30, you go to 18:30 in the audio recording and listen to the dedicated "slate track" for the click.

Just make sure your camera operators on the D90s know that they need to make SLOW movements.
You can get away with so much variation in the images when it comes to concert footage. The important thing is to get unusual angles and creative shots.
Try to avoid large amounts of RED light and swap gels out on the house lights if need be.
 
Why avoid red light?

SantaCruzMichael said:
I've incorporated D90 concert footage with HVX footage to good effect. PluralEyes helps a lot when it comes to syncing-up four minute clips from the D90 spread out over the course of a song.
Before that came out, we used a slate with a cheap digital timer taped to the front and a wireless lav on the back transmitting the "click" to a spare track on the multitrack audio. That way, the D90 operator could just carry it around and discretely re-slate any time he started a clip recording. Start the digital timer at the same time as the main audio recorder. Then, when you see a D90 clip that starts with the digital timer at, say 18:30, you go to 18:30 in the audio recording and listen to the dedicated "slate track" for the click.

Just make sure your camera operators on the D90s know that they need to make SLOW movements.
You can get away with so much variation in the images when it comes to concert footage. The important thing is to get unusual angles and creative shots.
Try to avoid large amounts of RED light and swap gels out on the house lights if need be.
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