OT: Note to self and beginners

bigjezza wrote on 7/24/2014, 5:49 AM
I recently recorded my daughter's dance with my 2 cameras for the club...

The most important things I learnt from the experience:

1) DEFINATELY LOCK WHITE BALANCE on both cameras! I have spent the best part of 10 hours correcting a 1 hour shoot (and learning vegas along the way)... Thanks to the differing cameras (HV30 and XA20) and auto white balance, not to mention the multi colored lighting in the venue, I have been busy after work each day for a week. What was intentionally red lighting the XA20 corrected to neutral lol.

2) Relax - during the first performance, there is a bit of shaking from my nerves. I had it on a Manfrotto 504HD head, not the best, but not bargain basement either.

3) Don't lock exposure on the curtains with the house lights on - wait until the curtains are drawn and spotlights are cranked up to get exposure. (I look back and think DUH!) The first performance was basically unusable on the remote wide angle cam.

4) Don't just check the front edge of stage for dead straight on camera alignment, check the backdrop too

5) Don't roughly lay out your multi cam tracks (to see how it works) without precisely synchronizing and forgetting hours later that they might be 3-4 frames out here and there.

6) Don't start a render the night before its due for review - IT WILL FAIL!

7) When editing/exporting from graphics programs, make sure you're in RGB and not CMYK

8) Going 1080p50 and 1080i50 down to 576i with Vegas is not pretty to look at, unless you add a bit of blur... Or find a different way to render with DebugMode FrameServer, Avisynth and HCENC

9) Check spelling on titles and lower thirds

10) Continue incrementally saving the project, ie dance1, do major changes, save as dance 2... That move saved me a few hours the other day due to a minor error made by me...

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 7/24/2014, 7:47 AM
All good advice, and things we usually learn from trial and error.

-- When matching footage between cameras, the Baumann plugins can be a huge help. HDV just doesn't have the same color response as tapeless, even when the WB looks the same.

-- Frame the scene, saving closeups for those special moments. Avoid excessive downstage dead space in the frame. Level the y-axis exactly dead center. Don't chase the actors or pan back and forth like school-play videographers. Zoom and set, zoom and set, slowly like the pros do.

-- When mixed frame rates are on the timeline, turn off resampling. When resizing the output, make sure a Deinterlace method is selected in Project Properties, and Render Quality is set to Best.

-- Always copy your video and audio tracks to new ones before entering Multicam mode. You'll be glad to have the backups. Sync to frame level before creating the multicam track. Don't apply corrections and fx at the event or track level before entering Multicam mode. You'll lose them. You can apply them at the Media level instead.

-- Often its best not to use Multicam Audio editing, but to create your own mix from the previously saved tracks.

-- Don't try to color correct individual scenes in post. Leave the warm scenes warm, and cool scenes cool.
Steve Mann wrote on 7/24/2014, 9:54 AM
"What was intentionally red lighting the XA20 corrected to neutral lol"

Stage lighting: Set your WB to incandescent and do not try to color correct in post. The director wanted a red wash and you do his vision a disservice by "correcting" it.
Duncan H wrote on 7/24/2014, 6:17 PM
Thanks Bigjezza, very worthwhile tips.

Re your point 8, having just had to manage exactly that scenario (HD p to DVD i), I received some valuable help on this forum in recent days regarding using script to resize generated media, however, I was still quite disappointed with the results. However, I got a much better result by first rendering to an HD (progressive) mxf intermediate, then in the final step, render to an interlaced, mpeg (DVD) template. Much better. Just in case someone wants to try this approach in future.
Rory Cooper wrote on 7/29/2014, 4:23 AM
Look on the spelling side I can help you with that.

You don’t have a problem typing the words, the problem comes in when they read what you typed. So add a blur to the text so people can’t read it. :)

Get yourself a mini torch so you can do your thing in the dark.
Welcome to the stressful world of stage production filming.