Life Jazz Performance

G

Giganova

Well-known member
Hi guys --

I was asked to produce a DVD of a live jazz performance. The main artist in the jazz band is a piano player. Just checking with you if you think my idea might work out:

- Cam A is in the front row, close to the band, sitting on a dolly. This will give me close-up shots and I can slowly move the cam on the tracks to give the footage some dynamics.

- Cam B will be off-center to the right of the stage. It will be on sticks and my cam operator will pan/zoom.

- Cam C will be behind the audience and will show the entire stage form a distance. That cam is not manned and stationary.

- Sound will come through the house mixing board into a Zoom H4. I will leave the shotgun mics on the cameras on so I can sync the footage with the audio of the Zoom H4 by looking at the wave form in post.

I will film on three consecutive nights, the set list will be the same, and the musicians have agreed to wear the same cloths each night (they have 3 sets of clean shirts ;-). On night 2, I will move Cam B from the right to the left side of the stage. Also on night 2, I will move cam C behind the piano player, pointing at the keys, shoot the hand of the piano player. On night 3, I might fool a bit around and shoot things here and there, mostly handheld, incl audience. Kinda "b-roll" footage to cut in.

So in total, the footage on the DVD should look like as if it were shot with 9 camcorders (3 camcorders on 3 nights with different angles).

Now to my questions:

- Do you think the above will work out? If not, what could I do better?
- Is the audio quality of the ZOOM H4, fed by the mixing board, up to snuff?
- I want to shoot in 720/24p at 1/60 sec and CineGamma settings to give the footage a "film look" (as opposed to a typical harsher video look). My primary cam is a JVC HD100, but I need to rent two more camcorder. What camcorders should I rent? The exact same that I have already (HD100), or a Panasonic HVX200? I have NO experience with P2 cards and don't know how practical they are for a 4-hour long shoot, but the small size is appealing
- Do you guys have a recommendation what rental house I should get in touch with? (I live in Washington DC)

Thanks a ton for your help!!

Cheers,
Gig
 
That seems questionable to me, but it might work. I really wouldn't expect you to get more than a few shots that really match. Musicians have a different dynamic every show, and it will never match exactly with the one before. If they're a really tight group it'll come close but not exact. Audience is a big part of that.

I guess mostly I just don't see why you would want to do it so many times. I would use the three cameras where one is mobile, one is long shot, one is doing close ups and pans. Or rent a fourth camera to add to the effect, since you're already looking at renting two for three nights. That's as much as I've used before, and I've never seen much need for more cameras, though it may depend on the size of the venue. The mobile camera can fill in, getting audience shots and whatnot. Or two mobiles. Maybe two close ups. There are all sorts of combinations that can be done on one night.

As for audio; as long as you get the proper mix coming out of the board it should be fine. I assume you mean everyone is patched through it somehow. If it's just the mixer that leads to the mains make sure you're getting a drum track.
 
- Do you think the above will work out? If not, what could I do better?
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Yeah it could work. But it might be too much hassle. Like Casalen mentioned, live performances tend to vary...

My suggestion would be to film it all on the first performance and come back for the 2nd night only if you missed some important moment or to get some cutaways. Also, first night tends to be more packed and might have more important guests in the front row so you really should film the audience on the first night if you can.

There are a lot of options and you can do a lot with the 3 cameras you already plan on using.

How are you going to communicate with your operators? If it's a 4 hour, then you want to make sure to time the tape changes. If you are not going to use some sort of wireless system to talk to each other, then get some one to run between the cameras.

Also, don't leave Cam C at the back unattended! Have someone, a friend, anyone. be there all times in case something happens.

- Is the audio quality of the ZOOM H4, fed by the mixing board, up to snuff?
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If the musicians are all properly miced and you get a good signal from the board, then it should be fine. Make sure you have the right cables, etc.!

What camcorders should I rent?
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The same! Never use equipment you've never worked with before! Using the same cameras will make matching the camera angles MUCH easier.
 
I want to add one more thing:

Since this is a Jazz performance, the audio has to be perfect. How many cameras, what kind of cameras, how you are going to put them, etc., all of that doesn't really matter if your audio is going to be shi*.

Talk to the sound guy who's going to give you the house feed and get all the details you need. Make sure your recorder is setup properly, that you have the right cables, and make sure you have some kind of backup, etc.

Besides recording to H4, get an extra feed to at least one of your front cameras. Record the ambient audio on one track and the mixer feed on the other track if that's possible on your camera. Don't forget that the recorder will drift compared to the video, especially on a 4 hour performance, and you'll have to adjust the duration of the audio clop to sync it in post. Test this before hand so you know what to expect!

If you can, hire an audio guy. :P
 
As a jazz fan, I'm curious who will be performing.

If they are good jazz artists, their solos (and perhaps even the heads) will vary from night to night. If you wish to compile the best overall performances into what will appear to be a single performance, you'll need to work hard all three nights. (I wouldn't necessarily count on just B-roll the third night.) Obviously, the musicians will know which are the best performances although they may disagree among themselves due to their respective solos.

Check out Bill Evans' "The Complete Live at the Village Vanguard" or Miles Davis' "The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel" and you'll see how much performances can vary.

Of course, if they're mediocre, don't sweat it.
 
I record tons of jazz (audio) in a field recording / audience recording type of way (as opposed to full on multitracking it).

First thing is, depending on the venue, and especially if it's a small venue, it's highly likely the board feed will suck bad. In small venues, they won't put hardly any drums or horns through the house PA, which means the board feed, in addition to being way too "dry" for jazz, will have absolutely horrid balance across instruments (whole instruments may be missing). In larger venues, this is less of an issue because more of everyone will be routed through the board.

If I only had two tracks to work with, and I felt the board wasn't going to cut it, then a single stereo pair placed well on stage or in the sweet spot back in the audience is preferable -- to my ears at least. In an ideal world, you'd have at least four tracks available. With that setup, I'd have one stereo pair in the room, and I'd tap a stereo board feed with the other two. Then mix to taste in post.

As for the whole multi-day thing, if there's one thing I know for sure, jazz is pretty much NEVER played the same way on two different nights, even if they are playing the same exact songs. Now maybe, just maybe, if they are playing super tight, going straight off the sheets, maybe doing their recent album with no improv on the solos, etc., then maybe, just maybe, you might be able to match up some footage across days. That said, it's HIGHLY unlikely. You're much more likely to take whole songs from one day or another, than to mix the same song across days. So, it still may be worth it because then they can pick the best version of three for each track. You also might be able to use some performance footage as b-roll from other days (like a slo-mo closeup from song 1 day 1 on the edit of song 1 from day 3.

Anyway, good luck...
 
Here's is how it turned out:

Here's is how it turned out:

In case you are interested how it turned out, here is a short clip:

http://www.vimeo.com/5618912

Lessons learned:

- 4 camcorders is the absolute minimum. If its less than 4, it gets boring to watch the footage over the 90-min duration of the DVD. I got away with 3 cams because I could use some tight shots from two songs we decided not to film for the DVD (I used those songs for some tight head shots as fill-ins). Although I had an agreement with the musicians that they would wear the same cloths on all three nights, they all dressed differently every night. One musician was wearing glasses/no glasses on different nights. Other musicians were sitting in on some of the songs, so you can't use any additional footage obtained on a different night. If it's a 2 or 3-day gig, film ALL gigs and decide in post what night was the best. In my case, the first night was a total bummer, the 3rd night, too (lame audience, no energy). The second night was the best performance, so we only use footage of that night. If I had to do it again, I would add a 4th (stationary) camera behind the drummer and a 5th behind the pianist with a tight shot on the piano keys. I'd also insist that the club owner light the stage better.

- One stationary cam is needed because no matter how many cameras are running, chances are that they will all rapidly pan/zoom/tilt at the same time. The stationary camera is the fall-back safety in case all other manned cameras are all doing something crazy at the same time.

- Audio NEEDS to be recorded for all cameras otherwise the footage cannot be synced (no problem in my case). In this case, one stage-mic broke during the performance but luckily we could use the audio of 2 of the camcorders to bring up some of the low frequencies of the drums. In the future, I will definitely have a Zoom H4 record independently to have another decent-quality audio track for emergencies like this.

- Syncing audio with video was no problem. The waveform of the audio can be used to sync them. Drift was small, around 1 frame/10 min (which was the typical duration of a song).

- Ideally, the camera closest to the stage should be on tracks to add some movement. A crane-shot would look ace, but the arm of the crane will inevitably be in the shots of the other camcorders and is too impractical and dangerous with an audience.

Overall, this was quite an effort (3 man crew, 1 sound guy, lugging tons of equipment, filming 3 nights in a row from 8PM to 2AM plus 2-hours equipment setup and breakdown each night, 40 hours postproduction for the video plus 40 hours post for the audio) but I think the result is decent.

On a side note: While we were setting up the gear for the first night, the artist got a phone call from the Grammy organizers if he could send them a CD or DVD of a recent performance for a potential Grammy nomination. This put a lot of pressure on the success of this project as the artist's Grammy depends on the quality of our footage! :-HeadPhones(D Given that this is my first customer project, I wish there would be less pressure!
 
Tainted said:
IIf I only had two tracks to work with...
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We recorded 8 tracks (stage mics into the board, bypassing the board and going straight into a multitrack recorder) plus all camcorder mics (which turned out to be a life saver because the mic on the bass drum broke during the performance and we had to pull out the bass drum from the camcorder's mics using tons of compression and eq-ing). In the future, I will set up a stereo field recorder in front of the band for added safety (I already had it there but then decided to remove it in the last minute because it was in some of the shots ... stupid me).
 
Per-Aage Braun said:
Place a mic in the middle of the audience so that you can incorporate their reactions with the movie
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We had a room mic picking up the audience reaction. Do you think we should bring the level of that mic up when the audience reacts? (applause, laughter ...)
 
Certainly! It makes it all more alive, but don´t overdo it. And bring the level up relatively slowly so that you´ll have more of a crescendo effect - even if it just lasts a couple of seconds.
 
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