Capturing great quality video at a concert is more difficult than setting up a camera wherever you can find space and shooting. You have to navigate around the sea of people, find safe spots to setup your cameras and keep the drunk guy without his shirt on from spilling his beer on you after telling you how nice your camera is.

As has been our mantra thus far, Part 3 of this guide on How to Film Concerts will be about planning the video portion of your shoot. I will be going over how to decide where to place your cameras, which cameras I recommend you use and general tips for making the video portion of your shoot go smoothly.

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Categories: Concert Films, New Media, Software, Tech Corner, Titus Films, Tutorials | 4 Comments »

We have been hearing it since the days of dial-up: The Internet is the future of… everything. I am hard-pressed to find anything still unaffected by the connectivity of the Internet. As active members of the media creation industry, it is important to keep up on exactly what is happening today in our world.

This can be difficult because we are “in the now” and it may be hard to see when we are engulfed in it. But if we take a look back over the last decade, we can easily see how convergence has already happened, and begin to wonder what the next big step will be.

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Categories: New Media, Old Media | No Comments »

Update, December 19, 2007: Please see my follow-up post with additional info on how to make Premiere AAF exports work.

I spent about four hours yesterday trying to devise an audio post-production workflow for a client shooting single-system (no audio field recorder) on the Panasonic HVX200 and editing in Adobe Premiere Pro 3.1.0. Conclusion? It’s not pretty.

After a picture-edit is complete, a rough audio mix of sync-sound from production is usually synced to the picture. Most low-budget indie filmmakers will have run their mic into their camera in attempts to save time/money on not buying/renting a dedicated field recorder. If they plan to edit with Premiere Pro, they are essentially locking themselves into frustration when it comes time to do any audio mixing.

While the Adobe Creative Suite and Final Cut Studio packages cater to indie filmmakers by giving them a boxed solution to make their film, Adobe is only facilitating the stereotypical poor audio mix that many low-budget independent films suffer from by not giving their users a solution to a professional audio mix.

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Categories: Software, Tech Corner | 16 Comments »

One of the most important aspects of a live concert is the sound quality. Whether it’s the fluidity and balance of the mix that your ears perceive at the show, or in our case, the accurate reproduction of that sound in the 1’s and 0’s of your recording.

In Part 2 of this guide on how to tape concerts, I will be exploring the different options for capturing the sound of the show in the way of microphone setup in the venue, microphone types, specific microphone models that I recommend you check out, soundboard recording and the different recording devices available to make your job in post-production a bit easier. I will also discuss a bit about room acoustics and things you should note about the venue you are taping in order to maximize the potential quality of the recording.

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Categories: Concert Films, New Media, Software, Tech Corner, Titus Films, Tutorials | 3 Comments »

So the Canon HV20 does 1080p for $900. So why not shoot the next Star Wars: Episode II (1080/24p on a Sony F900) with it? Because of the common misconception between “HDV” and “HD” resolution.

I was reading a thread over at TapersSection discussing the Canon HV20, and a user there was very quick to remind everyone that just because you see the golden number 1080p, doesn’t mean you will have a great image. Here is my response to the post, plus a bit extra, which tackles the issues of HD vs HDV and the problems facing a production when choosing which camera to shoot on.

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Categories: Tech Corner, Tutorials | 3 Comments »