Audio and Video question

[witzendoz]

We recently did a live demo video (it's not finished yet) and how I did it was like this.

1 Fixed camera (pro TV station type) approx. 60 feet from stage off to the left due to getting it out the way of the crowd. Framed to capture whole stage.

1 mobile camera, handheld (home digital tape type) for close up shots, solos, my face (haha) etc etc.

Laptop with Presonus fire pod, stereo pair of mics above mixing position 60 feet from stage into firepod mic inputs. Stereo line from front of house mixer into line 3 & 4 inputs of Firepod.

Recorded the audio as 2 stereo wave files, 1 from the mics 1 from the lines.

Mixed the audio by time aligning the 2 wave files, and treating them with a different eq (not much needed) and different compression. I also added a little reverb to the FOH desk mix as it was a little dry.

The desk mix had a lot of vocal and kick drum and the mics had a great balance of everything, so mixing them together improved the clarity of the vocal and the kick. Not quite a studio recording but a great live recording, we may put a track or 2 on the next CD as bonus tracks.

The film guys have the final audio files from me and are editing 3 songs as a final clip which hopefully won't be long. I may do some amateur extras myself later. They are using the 2 cameras audio to align the vision to sound, and if there is a drift they will just cut to another shot and back, however in the digital world there is not much drift even if the cameras and the recorder was not time locked, and you don't stay on 1 shot long enough to be a problem. Another trick I have found in the past is if there is a missing bit of vision (no usable shot) cut to a long shot of another song of similar tempo for a few seconds, no one will notice.

Cheers
Alan.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

They are using the 2 cameras audio to align the vision to sound, and if there is a drift they will just cut to another shot and back

Yep, using the audio form video as the scratch track to use for master alignment of the other audio tracks, even if the camera audio itself is not used in the final cut, is a common and good technique. The one caveat there though is if the camera mic is too distant, causing a delay between the video and audio, in which case one would need to align the audio with the video in the editor first.

Another trick I have found in the past is if there is a missing bit of vision (no usable shot) cut to a long shot of another song of similar tempo for a few seconds, no one will notice.

Nice one . I also try to take a few enthusiastic audience shots during the shoot (or even from another shoot) to fill those holes.

G.

 

[witzendoz]

Yep, using the audio form video as the scratch track to use for master alignment of the other audio tracks, even if the camera audio itself is not used in the final cut, is a common and good technique. The one caveat there though is if the camera mic is too distant, causing a delay between the video and audio, in which case one would need to align the audio with the video in the editor first.G.

Just to clarify, we use the camera audio to align the tracks, but we don't use the camera audio in the final soundtrack, only the audio that was already mixed / mastered from the FOH desk and the stereo mics that I had set up.

If we did not have the stereo mics set up I would have could used the sound from the fixed camera and mixed it with the FOH desk recording however,
The reason I took on getting the sound recorded was that film guys tend to worry about vision, their suggestion before the shoot was to run the desk line into the camera, if we had done this we would have got lots of kick and vocal with not much else, their second suggestion was to use the fixed camera mic as it sounds really good, and guess what, they only recorded to the left channel in mono and it was clipping.

Cheers Alan.