Shooting a concert - Need some help

[Andrius Simutis]

From the musicians perspective, it's so easy to slip a few frames between sound and vision and have the viewers instantly aware that it's wrong. The idea of a nice looking image and composition is great, but music videos are often watched by other musicians and using shots that involve hands feet and mouth give away random cutaways so easily. To non-muso's it doesn't even get noticed, but to anyone who plays - non-sync video is a red rag to a bull situation. I always use the drummer's down beat as my sync reference, so seeing a snare hot and hearing a crash makes for the double take! If you want to shoot some rehearsal and add it in, don't use a different song, use one that will be used.

Totally agree, but... you can pull it off when you really need to by using a shot that doesn't give away the song. For example, you can take a close up shot of the rhythm guitar player bobbing his head, and as long as the beat matches, you can get away with using it. Of course, it's much easier to just have multiple cameras.

 

[sonofaresiii]

From the musicians perspective, it's so easy to slip a few frames between sound and vision and have the viewers instantly aware that it's wrong. The idea of a nice looking image and composition is great, but music videos are often watched by other musicians and using shots that involve hands feet and mouth give away random cutaways so easily. To non-muso's it doesn't even get noticed, but to anyone who plays - non-sync video is a red rag to a bull situation. I always use the drummer's down beat as my sync reference, so seeing a snare hot and hearing a crash makes for the double take! If you want to shoot some rehearsal and add it in, don't use a different song, use one that will be used.

Sure, but on that same note, won't most musicians "get it" that you're shooting a video and can't have everything be perfect?

Like how we watch music videos, and sometimes the singer's lips don't EXACTLY line up with the lyrics... and we all just go "Well yeah, obviously she's lip syncing, we get it" and let it slide

I know it's maybe not ideal, but I'm a musician too and when I see cutaways that don't match, I kind of chuckle to myself, think "Well that was a clever way of fixing that hole" and enjoy the rest of the video