[Chris Williams]

Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out. Most of my shooting is concerts, and are at least 90 minutes in length. The Woowave page says of the current version:

THIS IS 64BIT VERSION WHICH ENABLES USE OF EXTREMELY LONG SHOTS!

Hopefully that means “two or more hours”.

I have a shoot Friday, that I can test this on. Honestly, I’ve gotten so good at manually syncing that I don’t know that it’s worth spending $100 on a tool to do it. The only time it’s an issue is when some “helpful” person insists on starting and stopping the camera between songs (I’ve threatened loss of thumbs if it happens again.)

[Chris Williams]

I realize this is an old thread, but it seems the most relevant, so I hope you folks won’t mind me reviving it.

I shoot concerts pretty much exclusively, and Micah McDowell’s point is very accurate – you need multiple cameras. These days, I’m shooting with five cameras…by myself. Here is one I shot fairly recently. I had a wide camera set up dead center to capture the whole stage. That was a go-to camera if everything else failed. I hand-operate two cameras, a Canon HF-S100 set medium width to capture an alternate view and my Canon XH-A1 main camera on my best tripod to get close-ups. I have two other HF-S100s on remote pan-tilt heads to get additional alternative angles. I monitor four of the cameras via a quad-split device normally used for security video (I don’t need to monitor the wide-angle shot). I’m constantly adjusting the two main cameras, and less frequently adjusting the two pan-tilt ones. Good pan-tilt systems are way out of my budget, so I never use them for moving shots.

I always get a board feed, supplemented by a pair of audience mics on a very high microphone stand. But I also always record audio on all of my cameras – mostly to for syncing the video, but occasionally it has saved my bacon, especially if a chatterbox has stationed him or herself near my audience mics. The cameras I use all have manual audio level controls, and the sound can be surprisingly acceptable as long as you place the cameras carefully.

I shoot in HD on all of the cameras, bringing them into my editing program to synchronize them (manually – I’ve never gotten the PluralEyes demo to work.) I make an SD proxy of all the cameras to be able to edit them on my laptop, but finish the full show in HD and put HD samples on YouTube.

I don’t want to reveal all my tricks, but I have produced a pretty impressive work-flow if I do say so myself. For instance, recently I shot two two-hour shows in Chicago on a Saturday, traveled on the red-eye, and shot another two two-hour shows on Sunday in Kansas City. And I delivered all four finished HD masters in a week. And all my equipment to do this fits into a backpack.