Making a music video

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danielisaiah

Active member
Well - I've been hired by some friends to make a music video for one of their songs. I wanted to reach out to some of you here on this forum and see what your shooting and editing work flows are for putting together music videos. i'll be shooting with one camera, a GH1(3)

One of the problems is getting the musicians to "perform" to a pre-recorded track. This band is a heavy rock outfit and I want to capture them playing their instruments. Now I realize that almost all the musicians can get away with being not "plugged" in for the purposes of "faking it"...but what about drums....? The drummer likes to slam on those things and I want it to looks real.

Heres my plan - and please tell me if anything is flawed.

1) make a master song track with a noise marker. it will have four loud beeps about 5 seconds in front of the music start which will help me line up the video to audio later in premiere.

2) Have the band "play" to that track. Hopefully I can find a loud boom box that everyone can hear (without the drummer blowing everyone away)

3) I'll shoot about 12-15 takes of the ENTIRE song (at least 1 of each performer, instrument close ups, whole band etc etc) , plus some b roll fill stuff.

4) So, once I have all that....in theory I can drop the master song on my timeline, and sync the four beeps with what the Camera mic picked up (of the same track) and start multicam editing.


Does this sound right?

Thanks for any replies in advance!
 
I'm curious as well...but what you're saying makes sense so far.

One thing that I'd reconsider would be the 12-15 takes. I'd perhaps rent another GH1 or two (or three) and tripod them in different locations in order to cut down the number of takes.
 
Yeah, that's about right -- though keep in mind that the playback device may not play back the music on set at the exact same speed as the recording of the song on the timeline (or it may even vary playback speed), so you may see some synch issues over the span of the song. So, if you're playing a CD, you may see this.

Or, the same thing could arise depending on the exact speed the camera records. Even a variation you can't detect with your eye or ear can affect synch.

Less of an issue if you're playing the same digital track(s) you're going to be using in the project (i.e., playing it from your computer through a sound system).
 
I saw someone had a good idea the other day. That was to render your master song for playback to a video with timecode burned in. You take a personal media player like a tablet or a smart phone to set with the video loaded on it and you can play back the song wherever you like. As long as the player's display is on screen somewhere during the take, you should be able to synch it up without problems. They had theirs mounted to the clapper board.

I'm not sure if it makes a huge difference but I'd render the video at a constant bitrate to avoid potential synch issues.
 
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