Everyone wants video now, blah blah blah. We get it.
But it is true. Everyone does want video for socials when it comes to capturing their shows and there’s a bunch of ways to get it. I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to do that. So here’s some rambling about how I’ve been approaching it recently:
I’m trying to find a way to separate what I do a little bit from what other people do. There’s a few common approaches I’ve seen:
1) grab a lot of nice and/or intense footage, make it look high energy and edit in a fast paced way over a music bed
2) capture parts of a song live with live audio so it all feels a bit rawer and maybe cut that with some BTS stuff
Both of which often lend themselves to sick results.
But, much like how I’m not getting caught up in the new fascination with wild tone curve edits or slow shutter speeds in music photography, I want my stuff to be a little different. So here’s the thought process behind my attempts to balance things that are a bit more “cinematic” with stuff that’s a bit more immediate and raw and get as much as I possibly can out of shooting a set.
I set up my B-cam, a Canon R6 for the nerds, with a reasonably wide lens, my 35mm is the usual go to, on sticks somewhere in the venue. The idea being to get a full show capture of either a FOH angle or a drum cam. Aiming to get a big bed of footage that has a use in its own right. Typically shooting this camera at full 4K at 24FPS because there’s no need for slow mo here to avoid overheating and save battery and space. Audio capturing using a Rode Video Mic pro.
My A cam, a Canon R5C for the nerds, I take handheld with me throughout the show. Typically I use this for stills and video, easily switching between thanks to the dedicated OS for stills and video on the camera. This I’ll shoot handheld, for a contrast in energy and still with the second camera, at 60FPS and usually switch between a 24mm, 50mm and 85mm focal length for more of a variety of coverage. Audio here is captured using a Rode Video Mic as well.
While filming, I’ve stopped just capturing moments and aimed for grabbing useable handheld one angle takes of entire tunes. This means that potentially you could get a cool one take raw run through of a song which could be fun and secondly that you can capture entire segments of songs that you could pull out for social with the charm of live raw audio or the option to sync to a recorded track or a bit of mix and match.
Oh, and I film in Clog3 on both cameras and the cine gammet on the R5C specifically for flexibility grading. Custom white balance if I can get be sure of the lighting, auto if not.
A static whole show and an energetic selection of handheld takes. Two use cases down. The remaining three cases come out of editing choices.
Thirdly, it opens up the option of using a one take as the basis for a music video. Inevitably, everyone wants a live video and having a good take of the song in question as a starting point is always a plus. A little thing I can upsell if the artists hasn’t had the idea themselves. One’s labour must be sellable.
Fourthly, it opens the door to getting live multi-cam takes of key tunes. Something along the HateFiveSix or Dai Tan Film vibe but without any of their charm of charisma. Always nice to have something that showcasse you performing live and this is a relatively elegant way to quickly, and cheaply, achieve that.
Finally, when it comes to the classic “show recap” kinda video I can now choose a music bed and sync it from two angles and then add in any nice textural stuff from the other takes as cut aways.
So far to help make that difference I’ve been leaning into a mixed media vibe for those parts and giving them a 16mm film-ish look via grade, posterisation and film overlays but maybe I’ll find a more creative solution for that.
I do all this inside of Adobe Premiere Pro (because I’m not a YouTube bro with a Sony so I don’t need to switch to Resolve. Thanks) and grade using Film Convert for my rec709 conversions, Lumetri for basic corrections and then Tropic Colour LUTs for my looks. I always produce a 4K and 1080x1920 option for all edits.
It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it’s at least painting the rims a marginally different colour. Or whatever the appropriate wheel based metaphor is. I’m not a nerd, I don’t care about wheels.
So that’s what I’m doing. Does it suck? Maybe. Guess I’ll just keep going until I have a better idea. Or a worse one. At least a new one.