'Live' music video production

[Andrew Prince]

Hi everyone,

Thought I would run this one by you all to see what you thought....

I am going to be producing some music videos and I have been thinking about how best to do it. I have a studio (large room with black curtains all around and some lights in the ceiling). I have a Sony Z5E and a Sony PD170. The studio will have all the mics, stands and a digital mixing console that can output to a PC to record decent quality multitrack audio and the idea is to create a performance video of a band.

My workflow, having given it some thought would be:

- Set up the two cameras to give different views. The PD170 would be static.
- Shoot with the Z5E doing closeups of each band member.
- Record a guide audio track on both cameras using the attached mics.
- Import all the footage into Premiere Pro CS4.

In Premiere Pro CS4:

- Drop the PD170 static video onto track 1.
- Colour correct the track and set the black and white balances.
- Drop the Z5E footage onto track 2 (using down convert so it's a 16:9 SD project).
- Lock the PD170 audio and video tracks.
- Sync the Z5E audio tracks with the PD170 audio tracks (zooming into the audio, this is easy).
- Lock all the audio tracks and the PD170 video track.
- Go through the Z5E video track chopping out all the camera movements so I end up with lots of instances of shots of each band member (as the audio tracks are locked, I will be preserving them in my timeline).
- Colour correct all the Z5E shots.
- Drop the stereo mixdown from the multitrack into Premiere Pro CS4 and sync that to the video.
- Go through the audio tracks and mute any that we don't need (probably the camera based audio).

The end result is the Z5E shots cover the static PD170 shots making it look like I have switched between cameras on the fly and it's all in sync:

Video 2::::: ::: :::::: ::: ::::: ::: :: :: ::::: :::: ::::: ::::: :::::
Video 1::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Audio 1::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Audio 2::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Audio 3::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Audio 4::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Anyone any thoughts on this? Am I doing it efficiently? Am I going about it completely the wrong way?

Further to this, the client is fairly adamant that he wants it to be a true live recording. That means one take, multiple cameras. Obviously I would like to do multiple takes with one camera so they match up much better and I can shoot it all in HDV on the Z5E (the PD170 isn't even 16:9 native). To prove to the client that my way is best, I shot video of his band rehearsing and also some other angles on different songs. I am going to splice the other angles into a test music video and stick a title over the top of each shot saying, "I know this is the wrong shot and not in sync but imagine if it was!" Hopefully he will realise that it's easily possible to create a live performance with multiple takes and that it's much more interesting to watch!


Kind regards,

Andrew.
www.carillonvideo.co.uk