I've shot a few concerts, and I've gotten better results by zooming in on the front man (usually the best-lit) exposing and (if possible) white balancing on them and then LOCKING iris, shutter speed, gain and WB DOWN for the rest of the shoot. You may get a few blown out shots and lens flares this way, but at least you avoid the iris "pumping" and video noise from high gain.

If I can't white balance because of the constantly changing light colors, I just pick the "Tungsten" pre-set. Keep in mind that the concert lighting designer isn't going for a naturalistic look... if you try to white balance for someone under, say all red light, everything else is going to look really weird.

Hopefully, you're doing a multi-camera shoot and can cut away from the truly awful shots. If you can't afford a second (or third) camera operator, at least buy, beg, borrow or steal a second DV camera and set it up on a tripod in a static medium or long shot (maybe taking an audio feed from the mixing board), so you at least have something to cut away to.

If it's well-lit with good contrast, auto focus works pretty well.

You're still probably looking at lots of tweaks in post to get it right.

One of the most interesting lighting I ever used for a punk-rock concert was the flame from a juggler's torch. You can see the results at:
http://www.prolefeedstudios.com/catalog/discider/discider.html

Look for the change in lighting when some smart soul brought the torch to the front of the stage.

Amen to everything from Brian here, matches exactly my experience.

Many people have seen a lot of music videos, so they expect to get those results at a live concert.

Not.

The only way I know of in these situations to get substantially better images is to shoot a rehearsal with special lighting for video (NOT just "house lights" obviously), then cut this with shots from the final performance.

Brian's advice hits the nail on the head. I've done a number of concerts as well, both by myself and as part of a TV crew (both in a mobile and a studio). The biggest advantage that working in a studio/mobile gives you is that someone else (called the shader or CCU operator) worries about exposure, white balance, etc. leaving you as the camera person to concentrate on your shots.

Mike

I prefer myself find the right settings, then running everything in manual:

- forget auto iris (horrible pumping).
- white balance with the main lighting used for the lead vocal (follow spot in most cases)
- auto focus can be hazardeous in lower lighting conditions.

We don't shoot bands, but do lots of theatrical and performance work each year.
Our approach is to attend a dress rehearsal and experiement with various aperture settings throughout the show, being especially careful to find a setting that avoids blow-out on parts of the performance that are lit with follow spots.

We review this back in the studio and decide on a single iris setting that will handle all the lighting in the show. This can mean some correction in post, but we never have to deal with blown-out footage.

Our goal is to capture on tape the quality of lighting which the production's lighting designer has created. A dark show -- Les Miserables or West Side Story, for example -- looks dark. We could open the iris and made the show look brighter, but we believe that this is an aesthetic mistake. It's not what the director and lighting designer wanted the show to look like.

For the Seattle International Children's Festival, which we shoot every year, we often have to tape performances by foreign troupes that we've never had a chance to see in rehearsal. In this situation we ask the light board operator to show us the lighting for the brightest preset being used. We adjust the iris settings accordingly, then shoot the performance at that setting. With the help of Vegas in post this usually works out quite satisfactorily.

We usually don't go to manual focus unless there are elements in the scenes such as twinkle lights, candles, or lots of metalic bits that reflect light and cause the camera to seek focus.

We always shoot with a minimum of two manned cameras and from time to time a third camera, remotely controlled and with a remote control pan-head, which is used for a cover shot.

Incidently, the time spent at the dress rehearsal is billed to the client.

Jack

Thank you to all!

Brian: "I've shot a few concerts, and I've gotten better results by zooming in on the front man (usually the best-lit) exposing and (if possible) white balancing on them and then LOCKING iris, shutter speed, gain and WB DOWN for the rest of the shoot. You may get a few blown out shots and lens flares this way, but at least you avoid the iris "pumping" and video noise from high gain."

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I'll see if we can work a female flame juggler into the budget next time. haha I watched the vid, but was having a wee bit of trouble making out the lyrics. haha Perhaps DSE can recommend a new mic for the singer! :o)

Mike, I thought something like that was the case with the bigger budget shoots (someone else worries about the exposure, wb, etc). Much like some keyboardists have someone off stage changing the patches for them so all they have to do is play. I however am my own button pusher.

Now I just have to figure out how to do just what Brian said with my A1U.

If we are filming a whole show, we do have at least 3 cameras now, so, yes I could cut to another cam during blown/bad close ups. The first project I ever did was largely made from a bunch of 1 or 2 cam shoots given to me on VHS (about 5 or 6 years ago) and it looks pretty bad on some of the segments. I did my best with what I was given though. Plus it was my first attempt at editing, so, that also played a large part in the quality. I had to use crowd shots and slowmo band member shots as filler.

I wonder if there is any where in the Los Angeles area where I could take a 3 day class or so in videography to learn how to be better at shooting vid. I've tried to find 1 on 1 training for Vegas, but all I could find were FCP and Avid classes.

Any way, thank you all again. I try to make each one of my projects better than the last and I most definitely couldn't do it without the help I get from this forum. Let me know if you have any keyboard questions and I'll be happy to answer you! Derek

You never know, some female fire-jugglers work cheap! I think that band would probably want a microphone that would make them sound LESS intelligible, rather than MORE.

Glad this was helpful. The HVR-A1U should have full manual controls, so you should be fine. If you're pressed for time and need to set exposure on the fly, you can try:
- set the shutter spead to 60 and the gain to 0 before you get to the concert;
- zoom in tight on the lead singer's eyes and turn the auto-iris ON to set exposure, then turn auto-iris back OFF to lock the setting.
-zoom out again to frame the shot.
- once you're in manual mode, don't touch the iris, gain or shutter speed switch again.

If you have the luxury of 3 cameras, make sure you divide up who's covering which performer, and maybe keep one camera on fairly wide and static to give you a good cover shot. If you can, see if the band will let one of your cameramen on stage -- you can get some really interesting angles if you're right on top of the action. Just watch out you don't get whacked by a flailing guitar head!

Don't forget to turn around and get lots of crowd reaction shots! These not only can save you if you need to make a cut, but help make the show more exciting to the audience.

Sounds like a fun gig, let us know how it turns out.

If you have the luxury of 3 cameras, make sure you divide up who's covering which performer, and maybe keep one camera on fairly wide and static to give you a good cover shot.

Excellent advice that should be followed all the time. A co-worker just finished cutting a 2-camera shoot where nothing was planned beforehand.
It made editing the show somewhat difficult, to say the least :-(
The other suggestion (for editing purposes) is to have some kind of cue point at the beginning (camera flash?) and make sure all cameras roll continuously.

To dhill, it's always tough doing things by yourself. The studio/mobile shoots I've done have ranged from local cable companies to live broadcasts for various networks. It's always a pleasure to work with a seasoned crew :-)

Mike

There's not much my limited experience can add to the guys here on the video side, but I'll add in my 2 cents on some audio.

I play in a band, and regularly record the gigs. Occasionally I sync the recorded audio up to DVD, co-incidently this is EXACTLY why I got into Vegas in the first place.

To get great audio, you would have to have a mic on every instrument / voice and record each to a sperate channel, and mix down later. Obviously this is not very practicle.

A reasonable alternative to the on board camera mic (which usually distorts something terrible) is to record a Two track 'Desk tape' from the mixing board. Most Mixers for live work have either 1/4" or RCA stereo outputs from the master bus. I take a feed from there into my Sony Minidisc player, one disc per set.

It's not a super sound, as the levels vary, usually the guitars and Bass are low in the mix, and Drums and Vocals high. If you need an explaination as to why this is, let me know.

So, from there, I get the audio into the PC, mess around with the EQ a bit to try to bring the lower instruments up in level, and then run it through my TC Powercore, using the X3 Mastering software, which helps a) bring up the overall levels and b) tightens the whole mix, bringing up the volume of the lower levelled instruments.

So what I've got at the end is a stereo wave file I can then bring into Vegas, and sync up to the DV audio.

It's not the quality you see on so-called 'Live' DVDs, but it's heap better than any camera recording!

Hope this helps.

Andy

Side Note: The guy that sold me the TC Powercore calls the mastering software on it the 'turd polisher'. It makes anything sound good! :)

Brian...yes crowd shots have saved my blank/problem spots many times. As I said, I didn't have the luxury of 3 cam shoots on my first dvd I ever made, so, I had to do a lot of fudging to even make something out of it.

Andy, fine advice. Yes, board mix is better in many ways than on camera mics. Something else you might try is getting your sound man to set up a couple of room mics back by the board and record multi-track 4 channels (or have him/her do the blend for you to your minidisk) so you have the stereo board mix and the ambience of the room sound...as you said, where the guitars and bass are present. Of course they're not in the mix on the board tape 'cause they're so loud on stage they're not in the mix! haha

The first project I did I synched up (to the best of my ability) our live cd to the video from various shows along the way (on tour). That would be listed under your "so called live performance dvd's." :o) I do as I'm told though. It wasn't in the budget (and time allotment per show) to record multi-track with protools or other another system at every single venue. The project I'm working on now actually is going to be segments of us in different cities (around 15 minutes long per show/city) to put on a web site. I may use it for something else also down the road. Derek