Concert Project Post-Mortum

[rustysterling]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this but I wanted to just note my experience in doing this project. I'll also probably post this on the Adobe forum.

This has been a long-haul project. My step-daughter recently released her solo CD ? two years in production. Now, when I say solo, it?s her first recording that features her but she had some help from some of the best musicians in the SF Bay area. It?s called ?Diversity Personified? and while it is mostly contemporary R&B and Hip Hop, she pays homage to all styles of music. She?s extremely talented and if any of you have young children that watch the Disney channel you may be familiar with her. Disney has produced a series of video they use as intersticials called ?Choo Choo Soul? that are aired on Disney Playhouse.

Anyway, the shoot involved two cameras: a Canon Elura 100 as a fixed camera, and a Sony HDD SR40 that I roamed with. I have a monopod that has a feature to attach it to the belt and this helped a lot while roaming to keep shots somewhat steady ? not anything like a glide system but OK. I did notice difference in the video from each camera. The Sony was a lot grainier than the Canon and the colors from the Sony were a bit washed out. I didn?t use the ?Nightshot? function of the Sony as I?ve found that this washes out all the color and is completely useless. While the stage lighting for the show wasn?t the best it was good enough to capture very usable video. I captured sound from both cameras onboard mics but opted to use the Canon audio for the project.

I captured everything on both cameras in 16x9 format and set up Premiere Elements 2.0 prefences to capture in the same format. I broke up the project into two parts. The first part was her performance with a backing band. The second part was performing with CD backing tracks. Each was about 40 minutes. Bring in the video from the Canon was a snap and PrE2 immediately recognized the camera. Also, I had no problems using ?Media Capture? to bring in the MPEG2 video from the Sony.

The biggest challenge was syncing up the sound between the two cameras. I stripped the audio away from the Sony and synched it on the second video track with the sound from the Canon on audio one. It wasn?t easy and I had to use a lot of visual clues to get close and then tweak. Thank goodness Genevieve is very animated and some of her hand and arm movements helped me a lot. I also found that zooming out on the timeline was critical. When the timeline was compressed I could get close but never seemed to be able to be right on. With the timeline zoomed out about 75% it became much easier.

I really leaned on the Canon fixed position for much of the shoot but dropped in roaming clips as much as I could to show other angles. I did straight cuts for all of the concert footage. I probably did more work than I needed because I would cut the two video tracks. Then if I wanted a roaming shot I?d Clear the fixed clip on video one and drop in the roaming clip to video one. In the end I had one video timeline for the entire concert footage.

When I did the second part I did about the same thing and then after rendering the project I exported it to an AVI file. Then I brought that file into part one.

For titles and introduction I used the cover photo of Gen?s CD. I faded in and out the CD production credits (something like so and so productions presents) and then my own credit (A Rusty Sterling Video Production). Then a fade in and out of the title. After that I did rolling credits of the musicians and special guests. All of this was over the cover photo from the CD.

Gen didn?t use her recording of ?I Left My Heart In San Francisco? for the show so I used it for the intro. After the credits I dropped in a number of scanned photos of her from childhood to present. I resized all of these photos to 720x480 with 70 dpi resolution. This is something I learned from posts on this forum and the Adobe forum. It helped a lot. Some of the photos in the final DVD looked more pixelated than I liked but not offensive. I did fades between each photo and that worked pretty well. I had no flicker at all with these scanned photos.

For the ending, I used another song from her CD. During the show I had to change tape on the Canon in the middle of a song. So I used that song for the close. I started with a scanned photo from the back of the CD jacket. Then I dropped in photos from shots from the Sony and Canon that I took before and during the concert. Under all of that was the video track from her CD of the tune that I missed because of the tape change. For transitions I used the cross-dissolve dragging the transition effect to the join point between each photo. It was very nice.

At this point the entire project was captured in one project with opening credits and intro and closing images. I then rendered the entire project and exported it to an AVI file. I created another project that I labeled final and imported the AVI file of the entire project. It was at this point that I added my DVD markers and created my menus. For the menus I again used the CD jacket cover and also took a short music clip from the show for sound that was a short of one of her ?Choo Choo Soul? songs. It was just the right length at 29 seconds.

Since this project ended up at about an hour and twenty minutes I burned the first DVD to a double-layered DVD. Before doing the burn, I disabled the screen saver the Energy Star functions. During the first burn I got a ?Memory Allocation Error? message very near the actual burn stage of the project. All of the encoding went just fine but the burn blew up. So I restarted the computer, disable some of the usual start-up programs and gave it another shot. This was successful.

I watched the DVD to see how everything was. As I said there was no flicker in the intro photos but the video captured photos during the closing had some problems. I also found about 9 minutes of black footage that had somehow creapt into my project. It must have been something that I overlooked. Nonetheless, I went back to the project, removed the erroneous footage, applied ?Remove Jitter? to the closing photos (which were all in one long clip because of the cut to remove the strange footage) and burned another DVD. I also want to note that the jitter appeared only with the clips from the Sony. The jitter was gone and the entire video looked pretty good.

I watched it all on a 32-inch widescreen LCD TV and it looked pretty good. There is noticeable grain but I kind of expected that because of the single CCD cameras and the low light conditions. I tried to watch this on a 50-inch plasma but I couldn?t stand the grain. So there are some limitations in watching on larger televisions.

I now have a Sony FX1 and will use that in DV mode along with the Canon for my next shoot. I think the results will be monumentally better. BTW, I didn?t burn the DVD to my harddrive because I have the luxury of a Microboards DVD duplicator. If I didn?t have this I probably would have burned the DVD to harddrive and burned DVDs with Roxio DVD Creator.

I?ll try to post at least one clip sometime this week. Unfortunitly, we?re going thorugh a web-based database software upgrade this week at work and I may not have much time.

[ed]

Great and intersting description of your process. Can't wait to see some clips.

[Maxine370]

We LOVE CHoo-Choo Soul. My boys watch Genevieve on Disney.

The project seems like a labor of love and I hope that is comes/came out great.

Looking forward to seeing some of the stuff.

[rustysterling]

Maxine: Whoo Hoo. I love it a "Choo Choo Soul" fan. I'll let Gen know. Glad your children love her show. It really is good and the music isn't typically obnoxious children's music. The original producers set out to create music that kids would love and parents also would enjoy.

Yes, it is a labor of love and I'm so happy with the results. It drives me crazy watching it on a 50" screen because of the graininess but it's much better on small sets. I'm burning copies like crazy right now for Gen and her friends and family.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Rusty,
More Choo Choo fans here also, my six year old Joshua is a huge fan and just loves Playhouse Disney.

My wife Criss and I think the music on Choo Choo Soul is great My son walks around the house singing the songs.

Can't wait to see some of your work!

[rustysterling]

LOL. I've had nothing to do with the "Choo Choo Soul" videos but her mother and I are very proud of her and her talent. Oh, and her mother, Kerry, is also a featured singer in my band, Rusty Sterling & Friends. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that her show is so highly thought of.

As far as my video, I'm proud of what I've done but probably more self critical than others will be. I plan to extract a couple of clips and post them. I really had fun doing this project and learned a lot in the process. As I said, I probably did a lot of thing the hard way but I kind of recognize some of them. I wish I knew more about key framing. I would have done something with it for the still photos in the intro and outro. But at this point I just kept it simple and tried to make it interesting as well as a good showcase for Gen.

[William Tranter]

Simple is usually best - leave the complicated transitions and effects for beginners!
All the best, and look forward to seeing your clips,
Bill

[happy2bapappy]

leave the complicated transitions and effects for beginners!

That's pretty profound. I like that.

[rustysterling]

I've always believed in the KISS principle -- Keep It Simple Stupid. It works for me. As far as transitions, I only believe in cut, fade or cross-disolve. And I lean on cut and fade primarily.

I do want to learn key framing. And I also experiment with PIP for a future music video I have in mind to produce for Genevieve. But I really don't want to get too far out with effects.