My Jazz at The Nash - 14 camera shoot edited in X's Multicam.

A few months back I posted some experiences using FCP-X in "massive multicam" mode to produce a Jazz Group shoot involving half a dozen DSLRs and an equal number of GoPros. (I think we ended up with 14 actual running cameras!)

We did the cast and crew preview party this past Sunday, so now I can post it in public.

It was essentially a self-funded pro bono project to benefit JazzinAz, a local music education not-for-profit.

It was a fascinating gig and everyone involved learned tons about the complexities of wrangling so many cameras in a short time frame and with an "all volunteer" crew.

Since I talked about here a bit here at the time, I figured I'd post the result.

If nothing else, it was a blast to stage - and most of the credit goes to the volunteer team who really pulled together to pull the whole thing off.

If anyone here has any questions, fire away. I'm aware of the many flaws, but am happy to talk about what went well and what didn't.

The link: https://vimeo.com/newvideoaz/review/51502778/0b24537119

Enjoy.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor

The edit eventually took 3 days. AND about two weeks.

The two weeks was spent figuring out HOW to think about my edit. First the approach: I knew I wanted to focus on the playing - particularly things a listener seldom gets to see like the drummers kick drum work. Once I'd gotten that clear, the edit was preformed in about 72 hours. I burned up the difference restarting multiple times before I found a strategy that let me approach that much material sensibly.

Here's a small example. We shot two songs two times each. With 14 cameras that gave me 56 "takes" to shuffle.

I initially sat down to keyword each take with who was playing when... but after a couple of days trying to figure out a keyword strategy - It suddenly dawned on me that with THIS material, I was going to do a pesudo-live multi-cam post switch, having range tags indicating ANYTHING about the video streams was irrelevant. What I REALLY needed was just to ID which shots belonged to which song and which take.

So A simple S1T1, S1T2 tag allowed me to "bucket" everything related to one performance - and line up my material for the post-switch.

Once I figured out a bunch of stuff like that, I was able to breeze through the basic edit in a couple of long days then spend an additional day or so fiddling with it.

Now that I understand how to better use the X tools to break down the complexities... this would probably be a 3 day edit - two on visuals - one on audio.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor

Still watching it, but I have to say that the gopro on the guitar is cool.

Thanks!

Totally a team effort.

That one took quite a bit of time to rig. We must have gone through five or six rig adjustments on that shot. Thankfully Daniel G. my Tech Director had just invested in a lot of mounting options and one of his plastic arm thingies was able to get the GoPro far enough above the nut to get that angle without making the guitar difficult for the Alex to play.

I wish we'd had enough time to "tweek" more of the GoPros as we did with that one. But it's amazing how time flies when you're trying to get 14 cameras dialed in!

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com - video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

Thank you.

As to the audio approach, Ray Berry used a Firewire Mixer and a MacPro to capture 6 discrete band tracks (Piano, Sax, Guitar, Bass, Drum OH and Kick) plus a simultaneous Stereo Mix.

I had originally intended to use the Mix to rough cut the piece and perfect the audio later. But after I brought the multi-cam initial video cut into a timeline, I started to see how it would be useful to partially "solo" the individual instruments when the camera shot was focused on that player. So I ended up stacking the instrument ISOs under the video mix and using X's quick RANGE selections in the audio to subtly highlight the solos.

I actually didn't have to do that very much, since the players were quite skilled at dynamics control and leaving "space" for the other players. An advantage of Jazz perhaps over the sometimes "everyone's trying to play at 11" typical young rock band approach?

Actually, the Vimeo mix you listened to has some moderate (2:1) compression applied to the video mix since our original recording preserved a lot of the dynamic range. Not knowing what anyone would view it on, I didn't want the quiet stuff to get lost. When we did the showing, we had a good audio system with a sub and the performance really came alive. Particularly the Bass track - since that often gets lost on smaller speakers.

Here's a snap of the X timeline showing my audio array during a quiet passage.



Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com - video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.