I hope the more experienced folks don't mind this post. I am fairly new to video production and I just finished a very large job. I learned a bunch of lessons that I hadn't read about in my studying of the topic, and I wanted to share with other newbies so they could avoid some of the pain I experienced.
My job was a 4-day shoot of a 90-minute musical variety show, with three camera setups. There was live and recorded (karaoke) music, comedy, etc. The final product was DVD and VHS in multiple copies. The lessons:
1. Don't let your success depend on others, if you can help it. The show sound was provided by others, and the plan was I'd get a feed from their board. The live band was mic'ed, mixed and played out to the audience on the PA. When the drummer got too loud, the sound man turned him down in the PA. Guess what my feed sounded like... Right, almost no drums. Next time, my own board...
2. Use the same kind of camera for each setup. I used a digital for "down-front wide" and an analog for "platform-left pan-and-zoom." Yes, you can, with color curves and other filters, make the two shots look pretty similar. But this is tedious, grueling work and the time is better spent making the whole thing look better, not fixing problems.
3. Make sure you have a say in the lighting. I have a guy in a white shirt against a black velvet back curtain, with no lights except for a hot, white spotlight. It looks as bad as it sounds... And get more light than you need. You can always stop the camera down, but there is damn-all you can do to fix a grainy, green under-exposure.
4. Kill the videographers. A dead body can't shake the camera. I'm kidding, but only a little bit. Get the heaviest tripods you can afford. Look into fluid heads and stabilizers. Train the operators and emphasize "STEADY!" You can, with track motion and pan/zoom, fix some camera movement. But after a few hundred million hours of this, it begins to get a little boring.
5. Don't bite off more than you can chew. I have been doing video as a sideline/paying-hobby for about a year. I must have been completely nuts to take on a job of this magnitude with no more experience than I have. Your second project is the riskiest. After the first little job, you think you can do anything. On the first one, you don't have all the big problems, and a little practice with VV makes you think you could do "The Matrix." So the second job comes along, and you say "Sure, I can do anything! Three cameras just means I'll have more clip choices, right?"
6. Keep reading this forum. Every day, I find something new that is helpful. The experts, like Chien and Billy Boy, don't know me from Adam, but they have improved the quality of my work tremendously.
Thanks again for your patience with this and my other posts.
-Don
My job was a 4-day shoot of a 90-minute musical variety show, with three camera setups. There was live and recorded (karaoke) music, comedy, etc. The final product was DVD and VHS in multiple copies. The lessons:
1. Don't let your success depend on others, if you can help it. The show sound was provided by others, and the plan was I'd get a feed from their board. The live band was mic'ed, mixed and played out to the audience on the PA. When the drummer got too loud, the sound man turned him down in the PA. Guess what my feed sounded like... Right, almost no drums. Next time, my own board...
2. Use the same kind of camera for each setup. I used a digital for "down-front wide" and an analog for "platform-left pan-and-zoom." Yes, you can, with color curves and other filters, make the two shots look pretty similar. But this is tedious, grueling work and the time is better spent making the whole thing look better, not fixing problems.
3. Make sure you have a say in the lighting. I have a guy in a white shirt against a black velvet back curtain, with no lights except for a hot, white spotlight. It looks as bad as it sounds... And get more light than you need. You can always stop the camera down, but there is damn-all you can do to fix a grainy, green under-exposure.
4. Kill the videographers. A dead body can't shake the camera. I'm kidding, but only a little bit. Get the heaviest tripods you can afford. Look into fluid heads and stabilizers. Train the operators and emphasize "STEADY!" You can, with track motion and pan/zoom, fix some camera movement. But after a few hundred million hours of this, it begins to get a little boring.
5. Don't bite off more than you can chew. I have been doing video as a sideline/paying-hobby for about a year. I must have been completely nuts to take on a job of this magnitude with no more experience than I have. Your second project is the riskiest. After the first little job, you think you can do anything. On the first one, you don't have all the big problems, and a little practice with VV makes you think you could do "The Matrix." So the second job comes along, and you say "Sure, I can do anything! Three cameras just means I'll have more clip choices, right?"
6. Keep reading this forum. Every day, I find something new that is helpful. The experts, like Chien and Billy Boy, don't know me from Adam, but they have improved the quality of my work tremendously.
Thanks again for your patience with this and my other posts.
-Don