ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

It’s no secret that Canon 5Ds are everywhere. They’ve shot music videos, short films, commercials and more Vimeo videos than anyone can imagine. One place where I haven’t heard about a lot of usage (as of yet anyway) is in multicamera concert production. There’s very real reasons why you wouldn’t want to use any small-form-factor DSLRs (with no gen lock, timecode input or external monitoring) in a multicam production. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t get the job done.

A frame grab of the full stage at the House of Blues in Chicago.

I recently had the pleasure of editing a 5D-shot multicamera concert. While I had worked with a lot of 5D footage in a lot of different projects this was the first true multicam show using the 5Ds. Multicam can mean a lot of things these days but to me it’s a live concert or show type environment where the cameras are all jam synced together receiving a common timecode. There’s usually a director in the truck calling the shots, all of the camera operators have headsets to communicate with the director, all cameras are recorded remotely and there’s some kind of line cut on tape at the end. That’s not the kind of mulitcam show we did with the 5Ds.

The show was a live concert at the House of Blues in Chicago. The artist was Gary Allan, a great live performer who’s a bit more on the rocking side of country music so we knew it would be a fun and energetic show. The destination was an hour long concert program for Great American County to coincide with the release of Gary’s new album Get Off On the Pain. The production company was Taillight TV, a veteran of live concert muliticam television. The director was Stephen Shepherd, one of the first people that I know that started using the Canon 5D in video production. Post-prodcution would be handle at the facility where I work, Filmworkers Nashville.

There were several factors that played into the director’s decision to shoot 5D. As a very early adopter of the camera, he and the show’s director of photography, Rhet Bear, shot what I believe was one of the first music videos on the camera, Katie Armiger, “Trail of Lies.” We all knew the capabilities of the camera itself to capture an amazing image but there was the question of how it would perform in a live concert situation. But Shepherd explains that his experience with the format as well as a specific style he was looking for made the Canon DSLRs an obvious choice: “I’ve worked with Gary for over a decade now, so i’m pretty familiar with the look and the vibe he expects from his video projects. The loose, hand-held feel of the Canon 5D was perfect to capture the energy of his live show. We’ve used the 5Ds for many music videos in the past year, so the post process didn’t scare me. It’s different, but not really any harder than a traditional shoot. If this was 5 years ago, we would have shot the whole show on bolex’s and handheld film cameras. Thankfully, the new DSLR technology allows us to simulate that feel, in HD, without loading 100’ daylight spools every 4 minutes!”

Considerations

The first consideration was probably budgetary. Live concert production can be expensive. Traditionally you have quite a large crew with a production truck that’s the central hub where all of the feeds from the cameras are recorded to tape. The director, technical director and a number of other crew members live and breathe in that truck for quite a while during rehearsals and as the show goes to tape. Obviously, if you are shooting a concert or multicam show live to air you have no choice but a concert like the Gary Allan show would get a proper post production schedule with plenty of time to edit, make changes and color correct. Cut all of that expensive overhead out and you’ve got a bunch of camera guys stationed around a venue, ready to shoot a show. But those cameras are all self-contained units with no link to the other cameras.

That brought up the second consideration: there was no way to jamsync timecode to all of the cameras or to remotely record the output. This wasn’t necessarily a problem as I’ve worked with Stephen on a number of these types of shoots over the years. All the cameras would record locally to compact flash cards and all of the camera ops would shoot for more of a zone type of coverage so, in theory, you don’t have everyone recording the same thing all at once and be left with no choices in the edit. Live shows can be very unpredictable so there’s always a safety camera or two positioned around a venue recording a master shot or two that’s the fail-safe if no zone camera is usable. Of course the more zone cameras you add to the mix the more chance of always having a usable angle. A line cut was not needed either as the show was to be cut from scratch. I’ve always felt a line cut was a bit limiting as an editor anyway since, time and budget permitting, I like to study all the angles and find the best stuff.

The third consideration was more the cool-factor of the cameras and the knowledge that if shot right they could record a great image. I don’t mean great from the standpoint that it is a 1920x1080 progressive image but more that the 5D’s image sensor could bring an aesthetic to the image and the entire shoot you might not get from smaller chip cameras traditionally used for multicamera concerts. There were the obvious things like the 5D’s shallow depth of field that we knew could be achieved without the need to be on a long lens as well as an overall more filmic look to the 5D that made using these cameras quite exciting. But I think there were less obvious things that we saw as we got into post. The low light capabilities of the camera meant the stage lighting was more traditional for a concert performance and less for a television shoot. And just the way the camera captured cones of light above and around the stage felt unique.

I really like how the 5Ds captured the stage lighting

Of course there were the potential downsides as well. Would the H.264 compression wreak havoc on the image in wide shots and the more busy onstage images? Would the camera’s small size and weight cause problems with the handheld nature of the shoot and make the viewer sea sick? Would the rolling shutter cause too much jello-cam and render a lot of footage unusable? Would the image from the different camera bodies match enough that they could be color corrected into a coherent look without falling apart? Would be camera ops be able to focus properly considering the camera’s form factor and the constant movement on the stage?

Production

The show itself was shot with 7 5Ds. 3 were stationary cameras capturing a wider shot of the stage. The other 4 were handheld: 2 in front of the stage and 2 on either side that could move behind as well. The handheld and focus questions were two that were answered early on. Being this was more of a rock n roll style show it was decided that handheld-type movement was something we could embrace. Add to that the shallow depth of field and rack focusing capabilities and you have a large part of the style of the show. There was also one RED camera used that experienced some technical problems and didn’t record the entire show. To make up for that missing angle a single 5D recorded a different show on a different night. Add to all this the band’s short rehearsal that was covered with 6 cameras and I had 15 angles at the most to choose from at any given time in the show; 7 at the least. The DP had a custom setting for all the 5D’s that gave maximum range for color correction, which basically lowers the contrast and turns off the sharpness. Even though the camera shoots to a highly compressed H.264 file we knew from other 5D work that there would probably be enough latitude to, at the very least, color correct to match the cameras. With two 16gig CF cards and an extra battery in hand per camera, the show went off without a hitch. This was one pass through the entire show. No stopping the concert for camera problems, no repeating of songs for more angles. As Gary says himself, there are no do-overs in a live show:

One of my favorite sound bites from Gary with an example of the before and after color grading.

As for the single RED camera used, DP Rhet Bear explains why that decision was made: “At the last minute we decided to add a RED ONE for our hero closeup, a decision I now regret, since we weren’t staffed to support the camera. The camera had some issues during the first couple songs and ended up only covering a portion of the show. We had added the RED partly because we were trying something new shooting an entire show on the Canon 5D’s and we felt the RED would be easier for focus and monitoring for our closeup. But after seeing the show finished we wouldn’t make the same choice again. Instead we would have placed a 5D or 7D with a 70-200 or 400mm to capture that angle which is basically what we did the following night in Houston when I re-shot what the RED camera had missed. The Canons performed beautifully, especially since we were in a controlled environment, and gave us the freedom to have more cameras with more energy for less money than if we had shot with a standard HD flypackage.”

I’m not sure if the malfunctioning RED was the Canon gods looking unfavorably upon the use of the single RED or the RED gods making a statement against the Canons. With the pickup shoot in Houston, the band wore the same outfits and performed a similar show. Lighting ended up being a bit different but our colorist was able to match it pretty well. If you look closely your may see a little continuity mismatch in sweat on some of the band’s clothing.

The other great angles the camera crew captured were during the rehearsal for the show. They were able to get up on the stage and grab some nice closeups of the entire band. Time was limited so they only shot a verse and chorus of each song but the rehearsal footage is featured prominently through the whole show. It was a real lifesaver.

Next up: Transcoding, editing and color grading

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Back in January news broke that reality television producers Bunim/Murray were switching their post-production facilities from Final Cut Pro to Avid Media Composer. This probably didn’t come as a great shock to anyone who follows post-production as the release of Final Cut Pro X had left many people (especially those…

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Awesome post. DVR set. Can’t wait!

-MJ

Posted by Matt Jeppsen on 03/03 at 03:12 PM

Wow, that was a herculean effort to be sure. I was in disbelief when i saw the headline of this since concert coverage is the last thing 5Ds are suited for, as you noted in all your concerns.

Anyway, I’m curious about you synching method. Normally we roll with a 7D as a b-roll camera for our monthly documentary show. On our current production we decided to roll out 2 7Ds as our primary cameras and then a HPX-300 to roll on a extra wide and to pull sound from. So our normal 1hr interview, multi-cam three clips, lay it out, and cut process became multi-cam 30 clips and they lay out, because of the limited recording time. From your workflow, it looks like we can just roll on audio the whole time and synch up all the 7D clips later on. How was that process for you? You mentioned some software you used, can you explain that step a bit more?

Thanks. Awesome awesome post, btw..

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/03 at 11:10 PM

Great article and lots of interesting pictures. I look forward to seeing the video on GAC.

Can you elaborate on how you used Plural Eyes to sync the 30p footage with audio from the board? You mentioned that some clips stayed in sync, and others didn’t. But what happens in the timeline to keep the clips in sync? Does Plural Eyes slice up the clip and extend the subclip in and out points to maintain sync?

I’m very curious to see if the CMOS rolling shutter affected the drummer’s movements as much as I have seen it in other music videos shot with the 5D.
http://techthoughts.org/2009/09/19/wetnoodles/

Also, as someone who prefers mixing multicamera live to tape (as it were) I’m curious as to how you feel the amount of ingest (on three computers across a whole weekend), days spend syncing, cutting each song individually, laying it out, and making a final edited master- (at which point both would go to color grading, etc.) was “was considerably less than a traditional multicam show” and “The Canon 5D has allowed us to deliver better looking projects faster and cheaper”

Are you properly billing all the time & equipment usage for ingest and editing? Because an HDMI to SDI cable on each camera, SDI mixer, and a good live event director (with coms) would have enabled you to walk away with an edited version of the concert, in ProRes, as soon as you said “stop capture” on the computer. Take the money that post took, and apply it to the production, and you get that week of post back to work on other projects and make more money.

I’ll grant you that it doesn’t give you the week or more that was used to carefully edit shots from rehearsals and alternate show days, but a day or so of editing the multicam master with the rehearsal footage would have provided that.

I’m very wary that a week + of post is being touted as “money saved” on production when, in reality, it was still money spent on the total production- or money not properly billed.

Anthony Burokas
IEBA Communications, http://IEBA.com

Posted by IEBA on 03/04 at 02:08 PM

On the syncing with PluralEyes, all the clips were converted to 29.97 prior to syncing. The software doesn’t slice the clips or adjust speed to keep sync. It sort of seems to put the middle of the longer clips in sync so the start and end could drift. I have a feeling the PluralEyes creator might be working on something to compensate for this since the software is so darn smart. There all those 99.9% speed change solutions out there but since we were handing audio mixes back and forth from audio post making these audio speed changes scared me a bit. I know a Pro Tools rig can conform these types of frame rate speed issues but if felt better to me to just slips some shots here and there to make sync, especially considering the rehearsal that we added.

The question on the CMOS drum sticks is a good one. I don’t think it’s as drastic as that link but it might be there ..... this Twitter comment sums it up well:

@mjeppsen: From a convo with a DP about 5D rolling shutter “I guess people excuse the limitations because 90% of the time you want to lick the screen.”

Posted by Scott Simmons on 03/04 at 04:29 PM

Should say “some people excuse” because I abhor the distortions. It’s the reason I do not own a CMOS camera (save the one in my iPhone).

If my images are going to be the official record of something, I want them to be as true and accurate as possible, and knowing CMOS distorts…

Posted by IEBA on 03/04 at 04:40 PM

Anthony, as for your comments about live to tape ....

as an editor I WANT to cut the show from scratch. It’s well worth a week (or more depending on the complexity of the show) to recut from scratch. I don’t want to take away anything from live directors as that is an AMAZING art in itself but I feel that taking time to study the angles and dig into the footage can make for a more unique show. I don’t know the exact production numbers since I was involved in post but there is a lot of people and overhead to get that cut live to tape. You’d have to talk to multicam directors to see if they feel it’s worth money saved to go live to tape but I feel the edit on the back end is work the $. Plus you wouldn’t get this look in a live show that we were going for with the 5Ds since you can’t get them live to tape. Cleaning a live cut has never been as satisfying to me as a full edit.

As for billing, the deal we worked was acceptable. I can’t talk specific numbers but 21 hours of footage would have taken a lot of time to capture off tape. Probably less transcoding ultimately since there was not babysitting time as tape requires and a lot of the transcoding was the machines crunching. As and editor I want all 21 hours available when I edit so tape or digital I want it all. All angles, all cameras if at all possible since I want to look at them all. There are projects when time doesn’t permit that but when it does (and if I can work the time in such a way that it can) that’s what I like to do since I think it makes for a better end product. Since this was our first 5D multicam there was probably a bit more time taken on several aspects than might have been required as that often happens the first time you work with a particular format and workflow. That will only decrease.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 03/04 at 04:42 PM

Yes CMOS distorts IEBA, as do all recording formats.

Wet noodle drumsticks with CMOS, or nasty vertical light smear from a CCD sensor. There is no perfect answer because no single camera is perfect, the goal is to match the best tool to the job requirements/budget.

Excellent article Scott, I really enjoy seeing people embracing the advantages of new technology, and working around the limitations creatively.

Posted by Bighatcowboy on 03/04 at 08:46 PM

Scott, I wholeheartedly agree with you about the benefits, of editing the way you did on this project.

I just had issue with the _twice_ mentioned “money saved” as well as “faster and cheaper” which seem to almost be contradictory to taking all the extra time to study angles and dig into the footage to create a more unique show.

Faster, cheaper, better, Pick two.
You’re clearly saying it was better, and I agree, but then it wasn’t faster or it wasn’t cheaper.

And I mentioned the HDMI to SDI converters because that’s exactly how you’d be able to switch these cameras live. Throw in a 2-day rental of a new Telex wireless CellCom and you have the live event basically covered.

Posted by IEBA on 03/04 at 11:21 PM

Bighatcowboy, I agree that vertical tears on CCDs aren’t perfect, but they are more akin to artifacts, like lens flares, than distortion of the image within. My eyes also have artifacts when I stare into headlights or the sun. Just like my eyes see a flash a single, blinding moment of light, just like a CCD.

The article mentions and demonstrates the un-normal flash effects that CMOS chips deliver. Then there’s the rolling shutter distortion that affects anything moving (to a greater or lesser extent*). No matter if it’s a pan, or a drummer moving his hands up and down, motion within the frame is distorted. There isn’t really a CCD corollary to that.

Then add to that the lack of a low pass filter causing moire and aliasing artifacts (probably not much an issue with this subject matter) and the actual low testable resolution of the vDSLRs* and I have to say that I’ll take the vertical tear of CCDs (which was largely mitigated with the latest versions) over all of the issues in CMOS cameras.

I agree the look is great. Put a CCD in the vDSLR and I’m so there. But the key reason manufacturers went to CMOS chips is because they are less expensive to manufacture. They’re still trying to figure out ways to handle light gathering (back illumination is the latest trend) and ways to subsample the chips to provide video without moire (center crop / windowing on the chip in the latest cameras) and adding software after the fact to fix the flash issues (Panasonic HPX-300) and computer processing to fix the jellocam (techthoughts dot org/2009/08/12/cmosfix).

There is indeed a need to match the best tool for the job. For me, given all that, CMOS-based cameras haven’t been a best tool. I just wanted to clarify the 3-rd party comment Scott presented that “people excuse the limitations” because I, and others, don’t.

* links
dvxuser dot com/jason/CMOS-CCD
dvxuser dot com/articles/article.php/16
dvxuser dot com/articles/article.php/20

linking stripped because it wouldn’t let me post otherwise.

Posted by IEBA on 03/04 at 11:54 PM

Great write up, Scott. I always love reading about out of the box workflows.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/05 at 01:32 AM

Anthony, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. As I mentioned I’m not the producer so I don’t know the exact cost of this workflow vs. a more “normal” way of covering a live show but these folks I were working with are live concert veterans so you can bet that if this type of show didn’t save money vs the more “normal” way then they wouldn’t have done it or be out shopping it as a viable way to cover a live show. Like any workflow it has it place and it’s certainly not for every event. I just can’t imagine that 7 camera guys walking into a venue with these under $5000 cameras isn’t significantly cheaper than a full live event multicam HD production even with some extra edit time. I’m simplifying a bit sure but we’ve done a near identical thing for years with DVX100s and HVX200s so you can bet that if it wasn’t cheaper than that wouldn’t have happened. That was using the cheaper and better. The EP’s comment is also referring to 5Ds in general and using the camera in this environment is just one other place where it’s making in-roads.

Also: “And I mentioned the HDMI to SDI converters because that’s exactly how you’d be able to switch these cameras live.” By doing this how do you plan to get the signal from the camera itself back to the switcher? Running a physical cable? That never would have worked.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 03/05 at 06:37 AM

The 5D MKII HDMI port offers 1080i out, which then drops to 480i when you hit record. Barring some HDMI breakthroughs with the Magic Lantern firmware, I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to use the 5D for a live switch.

The way they shot this concert is really the only way you could with a Canon HDSLR. I recently helped shoot a multi-cam 5D concert for Rascal Flatts in much the same fashion, for many of the same reasons (unique look, camera sensitivity, etc).

Kudos to Scott and Filmworkers Nashville for building a solid post workflow to deal with this unique challenge. Quickly turning around a creative edit on 20+hrs of footage is no small task, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished product!

-MJ

Posted by Matt Jeppsen on 03/05 at 07:47 AM

Great article, Scott! t reminded me of a very similar project I worked on back in 2002, shooting the rock band Garbage with what was the Canon 5D of it’s day…

...the Canon XL1, in Frame Movie Mode.

We used five XL1’s and two Canon Eluras, and did just what you talk about - every camera has a zone, try not to duplicate shots. I wrote an article about the experience in DV Magazine, but since DV’s archives seem to have evaporated, unless you subscribe to Highbeam it is a goner.

However, you can see a small clip of the show at this link:

http://tinyurl.com/27pku8

Apologies for the compression, but I wasn’t in charge of that…sadly.

I love this kind of production - I call it Multicamera Microproduction. I do several concerts a year this way, usually with choral groups, and the end product (although not being aired on GAC) never fails to please the audience. And no truck involved!

BAJ

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/05 at 01:23 PM

Great article, and very thorough. Just a few questions though. Have you used mpeg streamclip to transcode your files? I find the results jut about the same as compressor, but does it faster, even when I’m quick clustering, and I find that compressor crashes when I try to batch too many files at once. Also did you ever find at one point with the 12 minute recording limitation problem in that if all cameras started recording at the same time, wouldn’t there bit split second blackout spots between all cameras? Or did you start the cameras a few seconds apart from one another to make sure you always had some kind of coverage?

Posted by Thomas Wong on 03/06 at 08:20 AM

Thomas, I have used MPEG Streamclip a lot but not for these conversions. I have heard that it is fast though and i want to test it out. And I too have seen crashes on some installs of Compressor when dragging too many clips in. Droplets seem to help but it is frustrating. There was more babysitting on the transcode that I would have liked.

There was never a problems of a blackout with no cameras rolling. There were enough cams the operators were able to stagger their start/stops or just toggle in between songs.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 03/06 at 10:09 AM

Thanks Scott, great to know. and I highly recommend MPEG STREAMCLIP next time you work with 5d. It’s really quick to pro res, and you can batch as many files as you want without fear of crash. (less babysitting more time to go get coffee) My only problems with it are that I wish it would use more processor power like you can by quick clustering in Compressor, and or it’s inability to have multiple instances of it for more batching…

Posted by Thomas Wong on 03/06 at 10:30 AM

Just so you know, with Mpeg Streamclip, in the Batch List window, you can set it to work on 4 simultaneous tasks. I’ll have to set it up to test to see for sure if that uses multiple processors, but I believe that it does. It won’t split one job over several cores, but I’m fairly sure that it’ll split separate files withing the list up. It’s worth looking into.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/09 at 01:20 PM

Yes, I do use that feature often. However, I don’t think it uses more processing power at all. I look at my CPU usage while doing so, and there is no difference to if I was only encoding one stream at a time. It spans multi-core, but only uses maybe 20% of CPU. It would be great if you could have less overhead with it and churn dailies/transcodes/masters etc. out that much faster.

Posted by Thomas Wong on 03/09 at 08:28 PM

I hope this isn’t an obvious question, but why transcode the h.264 to ApProRes vs editing from the original files. I have only played around with 5D camera tests in FCP but even in a software only setup I can playback the h.264 files. Would an alternative workflow be edit in the 30frame h.264 files and taranex the output to 29.97 for SD delivery?

Great article, can’t wait to dive in deeper on future projects.
Mark

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/11 at 03:01 PM

donmarconi ... several reasons to leave the H264 codec. It’s really a delivery codec and not a post-production codec. that’s what something like Pro Res is made for to transcode to for edit. While FCP will playback the H264 files it’s very processor intensive and once you start adding transitions, layers, effects, things grind to a halt. More importantly you can’t send the H264 files out a Kona card to a client monitor ... a necessity not just for the edit but to master to tape in the end.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 03/11 at 11:17 PM

Great article Scott, just what I’d been looking for. We’ve been shooting shows much the same way since 2003, starting on the XL1 and working our way up to the XLH1. The 5DmkII seems very interesting, if for no other reason (though there are many reasons), it’s such a better investment than any video camera. You’re putting your money in to glass that holds its value, rather than a video camera that will be practically worthless in 5 years. I have a couple quick questions though. Regarding the 4GB file limit, do you have to manually re-start the recording, or will it roll over in to a new file automatically? If it rolls over, how many frames do you lose? Also, what kind of shoulder mounts and/or follow-focus kits did you guys use for the shoot? There is quite a range of products out there. And finally, have you seen anyone use a 5DmkII on a large jib with full remote zoom/focus control? I’m looking forward to seeing your concert on TV tonight, wish it was in HD though, darn broadcasters.

Posted by capturedliveproductions on 04/07 at 11:05 AM

i can chime in on a few answers if nobody minds. 5d will not roll over to next clip, it literally stops and you have to hit record again (don’t know if that changed in new firmware) so frames lost are as fast as the operator press record again. Main reason for so many cameras I believe, as Scott mentioned to my previous question, he never ran into any black holes in the edit.

Posted by Thomas Wong on 04/07 at 11:15 AM

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