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Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Planning and improvisation meet an all-day shoot bound for the Web.
Chuck Riedhammer shot Johnny and Jeanette Williams with a Canon XH A1 during the benefit concert.
On Dec. 10, 2007, two people were killed and three seriously injured in a gas explosion on a main street in Fries, Va., which borders my adopted hometown of Galax, Va. In a small, close-knit community of 600, this was a serious blow — financially and spiritually — to a number of families.
Fries, Galax, and the surrounding areas have a rich heritage of country, old-time, and mountain music, which continues in full force today. Fries was the hometown of Henry Witter, whose version of “The Wreck of the Southern Old Ninety-Seven” is said to have helped start the country-music industry. Ernest Stoneman, father of the Stoneman family (which is thought to be the first country-music group to play in the White House), also hailed from Fries.
Today, Galax is the home of the Old Fiddler's Convention, which brings 50,000 people to our area each summer. Local and national artists play in Galax's RexTheater nearly every Friday night, jam sessions abound, and The Crooked Road — Virginia's Heritage Music Trail — has multiple stops in the region.
Given this legacy and the scope of the tragedy, it was no surprise that a group of local bands, pulled together by Debbie Robinson and Joe Wilson from the Blue Ridge Music Center, decided to play a benefit concert for the victims on Jan. 1. Ultimately, 16 bands signed up to contribute to what turned out to be an all-day affair that started with gospel at 10 a.m., and ended with rock and roll around 5 p.m.
Robinson contacted me the week before, asking me to shoot the concert, interview the musicians, and post the results — along with requests for contributions — online. As was the case with all who participated that day, the work was on a volunteer basis, and I was certainly glad to contribute.
As every videographer knows, when most other volunteers leave for the day, their work is done, while ours is usually just getting started. Given the scope of other bill-paying projects that I had, I couldn't afford to spend three or four days producing the 30-odd clips, which ultimately totaled more than 2 hours of video. So my focus that day had to be efficiency. In this article, I'll work through the technical decisions and product choices that we had to make, and I'll conclude with a short post-mortem.
I was teaming up with Chuck Riedhammer, Galax's director of tourism, who shoots most of the events at the Rex and many at the Blue Ridge Music Center. Chuck would shoot one song from each set performed by each group, I would shoot interviews with musicians, both of us would produce onsite, and I would finish anything that didn't get done that day. We collaborated on all technical and product decisions.
Adobe OnLocation provided a helpful waveform monitor and DVR functionality
The first decision related to acquisition format. The video was bound for streaming, so I wanted to shoot in progressive video in SD resolution, and also try shooting at 24p, which should deliver slightly higher frame quality than 30p.
Choosing an aspect ratio was tougher; both of us like 16:9 for stage events, but we were toying with posting the videos on YouTube, which uses 4:3 delivery and letterboxes all widescreen content, making it look tiny. Ultimately we went with 16:9, which worked well. Between us, we had the Canon XL2 and Canon XH A1, which proved perfect for the tasks.
Next up was workflow. We knew that we needed editing workstations onsite, but we had to decide how to ingest the video. Capturing from tape would be too time-consuming and ungainly. Even portable hard disk recorders such as the Focus Enhancements FireStore series would involve an extra step of dragging a large video file from PVR to computer. Instead, we decided to capture direct-to-disk.
I've captured directly from camcorder to disk with Adobe Premiere Pro, which briefly left both Mac and Windows workstations on the table. Then, however, we thought of Adobe OnLocation, which runs only on Windows. I coveted its waveform monitor because lighting would be challenging, but what really sold me was that I could run OnLocation in slave mode, capturing to disk when I pressed the record button on my camcorders. With Premiere Pro, you'd have to start recording on disk in Premiere and then trigger the camcorder. I knew that at some point during the day, I'd forget to do the former.
