Richard Crowley
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
-
It is also possible that she could have an undetected medical problem. People of that age don’t necessarily get medical checkups on a regular basis because they are typically healthy.
-
I have heard of it before. Especially with people who have replacement (especially mechanical) heart valves. (Or maybe the subject was particularly apprehensive about the appearance? 🙂
-
The ones I have seen are simple text lists in rather large font and double-spaced (so they can be read by the camera operators in dim light). They simply have the music bar number, followed by the target and kind of shot. For example:
CUE LIST FOR CAMERA 4 – CENTER AUDIENCE LOCATION
01 WIDE SHOT OF ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS
13 CLOSE 2-SHOT OF SOPRANO AND ALTO SOLOISTS
27 LOOSE FRAME OF 1ST AND 2ND CHAIR VIOLINS
39 ON CUE, SLOW PAN ACROSS CELLOS AND DOUBLE-BASSES
51 HEAD TO TOE SHOT OF ALL FOUR SOLOISTS
64 PAN L-R ACROSS SOPRANO AND ALTO SECTION OF CHOIR (ALL 3 ROWS)
There is a production assistant (who reads music!) calling the bar numbers into the intercom system so the camera operators know when their next cue is coming (and how long they have to set it up.)
These shots are just for that camera, of course the other cameras have their own (different) shot lists. The shots are created initially by the video director and the music director based on what is going on with the music at each point. Clearly there are places where an instrument or section has a solo or prominent (or visually interesting) passage and they try to get all those musical/visual cues covered.
The list changes between each rehearsal and performance and the camera operators get a revised list for the next “take”.
Even for more modern, less formal music that isn’t played from a 200-year old score, you could make up cue points for each song. Then the camera operators would know when they need a particular shot to be ready for the director.
-
I light my green screen with $20 “shop lights” from Home Depot. The big green spike in your ordinary fluorescent tubes makes them horrible for shooting regular video. But the green spike makes them ideal for lighting green screen. Be sure to get the kind with electronic ballasts so you don’t have the audible hum and the visible strobing from the old-fashioned magnetic ballasts. If you want even color temperature and CRI out of them, you can just put genuine Kino (or equivalent) tubes in the fixtures.
It wasn’t clear whether you are talking about a fixed installation or some mobile solution? I put “baby” (5/8 inch) pins on the backs of regular 4-foot fluorescent fixtures so that I can use ordinary grip heads and hold them in place on regular century stands. For a fixed installation, you could just suspend them on light chain (as is the normal method of hanging fluorescent fixtures).
Then, of course, you would use your existing conventional lighting equipment for lighting your foreground actors/props, etc.
-
Is your sound track mono or stereo? Are you sending audio on both channels? What happens when you combine (sum, mix) the two channels together? If the audio is out of phase between the two channels they will cancel each other and leave near silence.
Unless there is some really compelling reason to send stereo, I would mix and produce mono and put exactly the same (mono) track on both output channels. You can’t go wrong with that whatever kind of screwy (or not) workflow they are using at the station.
-
I didn’t go to NAB to see the big whizzy stuff (3D, etc.) I’ll leave that to others. Surely there are many of us here who went to NAB this year?
I went to NAB to see potential pieces to put together an ultra-mobile HD production unit.
My three major contenders for switcher appear to be…
- Panasonic AW-HS50 A 5-input HD-SDI (or SD-SDI) self-contained, half-rack width switcher that runs on 12VDC and includes a multi-viewer output. $4000 https://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prModelDetail?storeId=11301&catalogId=13251&itemId=406589&modelNo=Content04082010011427274&surfModel=Content04082010011427274
- Callisto Micro-HD SDI Switcher A 4-input very small HD-SDI (or SD-SDI) switcher from BrickHouse Video Ltd $5000 (The photos show 3-input, but I think they realize they can’t compete with such a low input-count and they are changing to 4-in for production.) I was initially pretty excited about this product until I heard about the Panasonic switcher which seems to offer considerably more for less $$$. https://www.brickhousevideo.com/Callisto-m.htm
- Newtek VT5 or TriCaster Software-based solutions which feature way more bang for the buck than the hardware options, but at the risk of less reliability which is a concern for capturing live events. Note that with any of the hardware switchers, you get nothing like CG, virtual sets, etc. And you must find a hardware (or software?) solution for recording the live-switched program (not to mention camera iso recording). $10K (VT5 software) – $25K (TriCaster TXCD850) https://www.newtek.com/
-
It is far easier to estimate how much it costs to do a 60 second commercial or even cover a wedding than to “shoot a concert”. It depends a great deal on what “concert” means. Is it one person playing a guitar in a coffee-house? Or is it a 200 voice choir and 100 piece orchestra in a big concert hall? Or likely something in-between.
And, it depends on what the expectations of the production are. Do they just want to see what their performance looks like from the audience, or are they making a PBS special? There is no practical answer to your question as asked.
-
Perhaps out of place here, but I do mostly what would be considered “classical” music productions. Because classical music is “scripted”, the big-time productions have a PA in the booth on the intercom following the score and calling bar numbers so that the camera operators can set up pre-determined shots for the director to take.
For example, each camera has a different cue sheet and Camera 3 may have instructions to get a close-up of the trumpets at bar 34. So, by listening to the bar numbers being called by the PA, they can get the shots lined up and ready. Of course, the performers have several rehearsals, and the production crew takes advantage of this by shooting a few rehearsals in advance of the performance so that they can perfect the shot lists and get all the visually interesting stuff covered.
As is apparently the case in live sports coverage, it is also not unusual for several (or all) of the cameras to also roll “iso” recordings of each camera feed so that if some shots were missed (or something better comes along), the live-switched program can be edited in post to take advantage of hind-sight. Of course for those of us on much smaller budgets, we can accomplish something similar when using camcorders by rolling a tape in each camcorder to use as “iso tapes”.
-
Yes, there WILL be a sync problem if you are recording to BOTH the camera AND an external recorder. But Mr. Merrell said that he was using one OR the other, and such issues are eliminated by his proposed workflow.
Indeed, recording SOME tracks on one device and OTHER concurrent tracks on another device is practically guaranteed to be a big headache unless the clocks on the devices are synced together.
Note that for short takes (<10 minutes is my general rule), most modern digital equipment stays close enough without live synchronization to be adequate for many (most?) projects. But never when trying to record critical concurrent tracks (such as music) to different devices.
-
Oh yeah, I ignored all the 3D mania. Dunno what they are thinking? If everybody is out there shooting their home movies in 3D how are they intending to exhibit it?
I even heard of somebody mounting a pair of Flip cameras side-by-side to do 3D. Insane!