4th Grade Play

[MarkBarbieri]

It's that time of year again. The show is tomorrow night. Neither of our kids is in it, but we've offered to do the video.

They did a performance today for the kindergartners, first graders, and sixth graders. We did a fixed position video shoot. The music teacher wanted that so that she'll have something to review with the kids on Friday. I shot it because I'm using it to work out the camera shots for tomorrow night's performance. During the play, my wife and I also walked around taking photos. She's the yearbook photographer, so she needed some for that. We've also found that the parents really like having the photos. She shot mainly with the 5D and the 70-200. I shot with the 7D and 300. Handholding that sucker for 30 minutes is about all I'm good for. Maybe I should hit the gym.

For the video, we're doing the same basic formula that worked for us last year. We'll set up the 7D fixed on the stage and vary it between full stage shots and zoomed in to center stage. I'll use the 5D with the 70-200 to cover the left hand bleachers and for close-ups on the stage. My wife will do the same with our video camera (an old XH-A1) on the right side.

We made a small change to our audio setup. We used to record audio off of the mixer board into a Sony PCM-D50. That worked OK, but the mix used for the live performance wasn't quite what we wanted for the video (the bleachers were too quiet relative to the CD music). We split the mic inputs and took a set to our own splitter. That worked better, but I had to simultaneous work 2 cameras and a mixer and so my mixing was really sloppy. For this year, we got a Zoom R16, which will record all six microphones on separate tracks so that I can do all the mixing in post production. I just hope that I understand how to use it. I'll probably hook up the PCM-D50 as a fallback.

I've got so many moving parts that I had to write a gear list to make sure that I don't forget anything. I hope I have everything on my gear list. Here's what I'm hauling in:

1. Borrowed tripod
2. My light tripod
3. My large tripod
4. Large video head
5. Small video head
6. Small ballhead
7. XH-A1 video camera
8. 5DM2 DSLR
9. 7D DSLR
10. Two video camera batteries
11. 3 Camera batteries
12. 5DM2 battery
13. Video tape
14. Backup video tape
15. Head cleaner
16. Small ballhead
17. 24-105mm
18. 17-40mm
19. 70-200mm
20. 2 32gig CF cards & 1 16gig CF card
21. Expodisc
22. Color checker
23. Magic arm
24. Magic arm plate
25. External video monitor
26. Monitor battery
27. Monitor battery cable
28. HDMI cable
29. Hoodman loupe
30. Folding table
31. PCM-D50 audio recorder
32. 1/8" to RCA cable
33. Memory stick
34. Zoom r16 Audio recorder
35. 8gig SD card
36. 10 new AA batteries
37. Microphone splitter
38. Power strip

After the shoot, I'll mix the audio streams and video streams and produce a Blu-ray and DVD along with a "digital copy" for each disc. Last year our Blu-ray sales never got over 15% of total sales. I'm curious to see if they'll be much higher this year.

Another change that I'm making from last year is that I'm switching from 30fps to 24fps. I was a pretty firm believer that higher frame rates are always better until I experimented with the settings on our TV that let you convert 24fps to 120fps. Yuck. Now I want to see what a play shot in 24fps will look like. I'm a little concerned about the bleacher pans, but we'll be extra careful not to pan too quickly.

The kids are off all next week, so instead of rushing to get the video ready over a weekend, I'll have all week to play with it. That'll be a nice change. I still get nervous before these things. I don't do it often enough to feel comfortable and I'm always afraid that something dreadful is going to go wrong. That's why I have a backup for almost everything (extra batteries, extra recording media, two audio recording solutions, etc). It is both amusing and a bit nerve racking that everyone there thinks that I know everything about what I'm doing but I always feel like I'm treading on the ragged edge of my skill and knowledge. Wish me luck.

 

[Code]

Good luck, you sound like you know everything about what you're doing

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

No small operation....

Good luck with the shoot!

 

[PrincessInOz]

Are you sure you have everything you need?

I'm no expert...but I would have thought that a list comprising of 42 items would be the answer....(to life, the universe and everything). You're about 4 items short.


Good luck with the shoot.

 

[campinggal]

Makes my weekend shooting a soccer tournament and posting a few pics the parents can share on their FB pages and school website look like a walk in the park!

Best of luck tonight- nice thing you are doing for all those parents and the school!

Although not 'gear'...don't forget water for you and your wife...you'll be working hard...and a nice cold beverage for when you arrive home!

 

[AlbertZeroK]

Makes my weekend shooting a soccer tournament and posting a few pics the parents can share on their FB pages and school website look like a walk in the park!

Best of luck tonight- nice thing you are doing for all those parents and the school!

Although not 'gear'...don't forget water for you and your wife...you'll be working hard...and a nice cold beverage for when you arrive home!

Agreed, I shoot a fair amount of pageants and that has been a huge learning curve. But again, nothing like this production.

 

[handicap18]

I do a basic video set up for my DW who is a music teacher at our elementary school. I've been videoing her performances for the last 10 years or so. In fact I'll be doing the 3rd grade performance in about 45 minutes.

I never thought to offer a copy to parents to purchase. I know there are A LOT of parents that have their own video camera's there too.

I have a wireless mic that I set up in front of the first row and transmit it wirelessly to my video camera. I got that set up maybe 8 years ago and still works fine with my new video camera.

I mostly get a wide shot of the stage as the kids are performing and I'll also zoom in close a few times and pan back and forth slowly to get each kid on camera singing.

This will be the first time that I'll be burning a copy to DVD. My old video camera is a Hi8 tape so I would just copy it to tape and give DW a copy to bring to school to show the kids. That camera no longer works and now I have a camera that records to an SD card. Having my iMac will certainly make making a DVD easier.

We'll see how things go. Now if I can just find my old tripod. My new tripod has a ball head and that just doesn't work very well when trying to pan and tilt.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

Wait a second.....

You're not bringing all of your lighting and portrait gear with to so you can do headshots of the actors in costume?

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Wait a second.....

You're not bringing all of your lighting and portrait gear with to so you can do headshots of the actors in costume?

You laugh, but our plan for the next play is to do quick studio shoots of the main characters a week or two before the play and then make posters.

We did the shoot tonight. I'm ready to start editing tomorrow. I think it went well, but we'll see when we look at the footage. It'll have to wait until tomorrow night, though. I'm going on a field trip to a civil war re-enactment with my fifth grader tomorrow.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

You laugh, but our plan for the next play is to do quick studio shoots of the main characters a week or two before the play and then make posters.

We did the shoot tonight. I'm ready to start editing tomorrow. I think it went well, but we'll see when we look at the footage. It'll have to wait until tomorrow night, though. I'm going on a field trip to a civil war re-enactment with my fifth grader tomorrow.

I figured it would be coming sooner or later. Hope the footage turned out. Have fun at the re enactment

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I finished my first draft. Some things I noted:

1) I shot the video at ISO 1600. I'm going to experiment with higher ISO in the future so that I can get greater DOF. When I pan the bleachers, I have a hard time getting the kids in the front and back row in focus. Same thing for shots on the stage. This is one case where shallow DOF is a curse and not a blessing. I wouldn't be surprised if APS-C or smaller sensors become the standard for video for this reason and that FF is used for specialty shots. Maybe they'll design sensors so that you can shoot 1080p off of varying parts of the sensor so that you can have the best of both worlds.

2) I love having a recording of each microphone separately. One one of the choir mics I picked up a bunch of low rumbling sounds from time to time. If I had everything mixed, I would have wiped out the low end cleaning up the rumbles. Now I just drop it from one mic. You can still hear where I cleaned it up if you listen carefully for it and have a nice sound system, but it is much less noticeable than the rumbling.

3) I found out that Premiere Pro doesn't encode surround sound natively. You need a $300 plug-in for that. I found a work-around. I exported the audio as a 6 channel wave file and imported it into Audacity. It uses ffmpeg to encode to a reverse engineered AC3 format. The issue Adobe faces is that Dolby wants a hefty premium to license encoders. That's why they can't just bundle it. Audacity is an open source project that reverse engineered the format and outputs compatible sound. So I'll have to be sure to just call it 5.1 surround sound and not "Dolby Digital".

I used the surround channels to mix in audience laughter and applause. It's a nice effect when watching it in a room with a good surround setup. I also used it to push the choir singing out to the corners but kept the stage performance on the center channel.

4) I hate the letter "P". I spent about an hour today cleaning up microphone pops, all of which came from words beginning with "P". I wanted to donate some mic screens to the school, but my wife pointed out that people would rather hear a few pops than have their kids faces obscured by a 6" screen.

5) I got the CD of the music from the teacher so that I could mix it in with my recording. That makes for better sounding music than just using what comes in from the mics. After listening to it, I think I'm going to just leave it without the music. The recording sounds OK and the kids really stand out. It's all about the kids, so hearing more of them is better. I'll send a few samples of each version to the music teacher just to make sure that she agrees.

6) I had a nice idea to make it better for the parents. I noticed that many of them still record the show even though they also buy the disc. They do that so that they can see more of their kid. So my idea is to include 3 video tracks. You can watch the standard play, which is a mix of all three cameras. You can also watch a mix focused on the left camera or one focused on the right camera. If your kid is in the choir and doesn't have a significant stage part, this will give you a lot more looks of your kid.

7) I need to run out and buy a Blu-ray that includes a "digital copy" tomorrow. I'd like to see how they store it and make it available. I've been sticking digital copies in iPod touch format in my recent videos, but I don't think anyone has ever used them. Now that normal discs are doing that, I'd like to follow their standard so that people are more likely to be able to use them. It seems like most 4th graders these days have some sort of handheld video device, so I think this will be cool. I can imagine them showing grandma a "music video" with them in it.