David Pogue Last week, my son’s middle-school jazz band performed at the conference of the Connecticut Music Educators’ Association in Hartford, Conn. It was a big thrill for our 11-year-old piano player; only one jazz band, one chorus and one orchestra had been invited to play.
The jazz band’s director, who knows of my background, asked if I’d be willing to videotape the performance. Willing!? You kidding? I live for this stuff!
In fact, I hatched a spectacular scheme: I’d do a multicamera shoot. I’d take two Flip Mino HD camcorders — little tiny plastic boxes, smaller than an iPod — and tape them up onto mike stands or flagpoles to get interesting full-band angles. Then I’d sit in the audience with my Canon HV30 hi-def tape camcorder for the detail work: closeups of soloists, pans across the faces, gradual pullout zooms and so on.
And then I’d edit it all together in Final Cut, which has a multiple-camera feature. Supposedly, once you’ve dumped all your footage onto the Mac, you can watch the multiple camera feeds play back together in a window. You can record your cutting between camera angles using keyboard keystrokes, as though you’re a director in a control room.
The show was fantastic — these kids are really, really good — and the Flips performed flawlessly, recording the entire 45-minute show in a single take.
Once in Final Cut, however, I discovered a few problems. First, the Flips’ audio and video drifts out of sync if a single shot goes on too long. (I’m guessing that not many people routinely use the Flip camcorder for such long takes, which is why I hadn’t heard of this glitch.) That pretty much ruled out my using the multiclip editing feature, which requires perfect sync between the audio and video of your multiple angles. (I wound up cutting between video tracks manually, which wasn’t as quick but worked fine.)
Second, the Flip footage didn’t match the color of the Canon’s footage. The Flips remembered the room lighting being slightly yellower than the Canon did — enough to notice every time I switched cameras. I bumbled around in Final Cut until I found the Color Correction filter, which made it simple to remove the yellow cast to match the Canon’s tint. Final Cut had to “re-render” all of that Flip video after that, which took an hour, but the result was magnificent.
I’ll try to get permission to post the final product online so you can see it (which can be tricky when kids are involved).
But here’s the bottom line: I wound up creating what looks like one of those PBS Carnegie Hall specials. Sure, two of my three cameras were unmanned, cheap plastic boxes, held in place with duct tape. But they let me keep interest alive by cutting back and forth, interspersing closeups of young players concentrating, soloists’ fingers riffing, audience reaction shots and so on — on the cheap. On the very, very cheap.
Let the grass-roots video revolution continue!
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