OK, so a few production notes on the recently released video for Lost In Audio and ‘Angeline’. This time around I had to venture out from my usual hermetic existence amidst the potato fields and venture to a city centre club and speak (amplified) to real people from (OMG) the stage. Good grief. Still, it all came off rather well.
Working Footage : Around 42Gb of content between the various camera’s – 5DII and XF100. Why so much? Well, there’s lots of angles and to be honest I couldn’t be hacked with trying to sync lots of segments from different time bases. So yes, all the synced segments (i.e. 99% of it) were recorded for the whole song. It’s easy to cut using the sheer pleasure that is FCP Multi-Clip sequences plus the playback track had clicks either end, so it was a complete doodle to line everything up. And yeah, CF storage is cheap. If I was shooting on Super-8, I guess I would have got four angles 🙂
Cut Ratio : 129 cuts in 159 seconds, so that makes 1 cut every 1.2 seconds. Considering the recent run of slow-paced video’s that’s more like it! Of course some of the cuts are super-duper quick so I’d imagine the actual cut ratio is more like 2 seconds.
Clips : Around 18 complete syncs of the song + some bits of narrative stuff that I never used.
Capture Time : Around 3 hours. So yes, somewhat hectic. Why so quick? Well, the audience were there FOC : No lunch, no drinks and on a Sunday…We needed as many people as possible and some could only spare 2 hours, some had to leave at 1, some had go home for Sunday lunch. So it was two basic set-ups (band on stage + Singer on the floor) and max angles and energy. I got hot. And probably shouted a bit.
Editing Time : Very quick. Two versions were done – one with hyper-cutting and the one you see now. It’s a short, intense punk song so no time for messing around!
Preparation Time : Around 6 hours to get the shot list together.
Video Treatment : Nothing more than a straight performance video in a local club with fans jumping up and down.
Camera’s : Canons all the way – 5DII, usually fitted with the 17-40MM (at around 800 ISO) and XF100 for whizzing around.
Camera Picture Profile : 5DII = Cinestyle, XF = Custom profile based on the BBC dude’s settings.
Workflow : All raw footage converted to ProRes LT @ 1080. Delivered to YouTube as 720P H264 / Max bitrate = 5000Kbs. Left it at 720P so I had some latitude for panning and also that noise was likely to be high-ish due to the low light.
Lighting : Club lighting + trusty dedo-lights.
NLE : Final Cut Pro 7 + Magic Bullet Looks (loadsa flare!)
Other Kit : Sachtler Ace Tripod and Glidetrack Shooter as a basic shoulder rig for the XF. And of course, a water spray for the drums!
What did I learn : Specify a dress code and shout more 🙂
Here ye go:
80:8 Moving | Still | Blog 