Shooting a Music Video

Brett

Brett

Well-known member
I do short films and have filmed some concerts before so I have a basic idea of what im doing as far as syncing audio up. but as far as shooting a music video into cuts and different angles how would be the best way to even start?
Im sure I would bring an mp3 player and play each part to sync up with the guys..
but anyhow I will let you guys tell me your ideas so I can get a more broader idea on what the heck im doing. im going to have a short story going on throughout the whole performance so it wont be just playing. any tips and ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
For editing, you'll have to have the music file in a 16-bit/48k file, so I'd get as high-res a copy as possible from the band (CD if possible) and go ahead and convert the song. That'll keep most drift issues at bay (unless you have a TC-based audio player, or spare DV or DVCAM deck, where drift won't be an issue).

Add sync beeps to the head of the song: 1 frame pops of 1k tone at 3 seconds out, 2 seconds out, and 1 second out from the first frame of audio. This is a hack sync system. Better would be to get the BPM count for the piece and andd the sync beeps in rhythm... helps the band hit the first beat of the song. Export that file and put it on your iPod, or edit it to tape, whatever your playback method will be.

Connect your iPod or deck to a small PA system on the set. Keep your camera mic on, so that you record the sync pops for each take.

I usually start the edit by placing each full take on its own layer of video, lining them all up with the source audio file using the sync pops and ditching camera audio, then start whittling away the footage I won't be using from each take. Once you have something that roughly resembles your concept/storyboard, you can start dragging clips down to use fewer layers and clean up your time line.
 
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shooting with DVX any special recommendations/settings i should consider using this camera?
 
TMY said:
Power on, Lens cap off.
Click to expand...

That's about it.

I'd say shoot flat, 24pA, and tweak your look in post.

Since you are doing some storytelling with this, you have an advantage. If the story portions don't need to sync with the music (if no one is lip-syncing, etc.), shooting with playback doesn't really matter. I'd do three, four, maybe five full takes of the band, each at a different angles. Then intercut your story pieces.
 
I just finished one with my band. We didn't do any special sync things, just played it out of a pa system on set an had them/me play our parts and then when i imported into FCP, I just dragged the clips in all on different video tracks, and I marked a point where a cymbal was hit in the song, then listened to the audio from the camera and then just synced it up on to that point... I guess it depends what kind of music video you are doing. I only did this for the choruses because those were the same location just different CU, MCU, FS, ECU... Just have a good quality version of the actual audio file and drag it in like audio track #15. I just brought it down a lot so I didn't have to deal with interference when I dragged in the video clips. When I'm done I'll just bring it up and unmute everything.
 
We just did a similar thing, except we did it live (multi-cam, recording audio and video). The same principles that C2V described were used to sync up the final audio mix & video edit in post.

The only thing I can add is to be sure to feed an output of your playback device to one channel of the camera's on-board audio for easier syncing in post.

Here is the final product in case your interested.:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
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