the funklab

For an indepth update, check out my coconspirator and good friend djp72’s blog.

Well, we’ve worked hard, and all the editing for the DVD is finished. What we are up to now is Color Correcting. We tweak each shot to give it the feel and mood that we’re trying to get for the song. You can view an example of the difference here.

For all you wondering how to go about post production of such a large project (full length live band DVD), here is a little overview of the process.

We shot the concert with 4 Sony HDV Z1’s on the DVCAM setting. The camera is capable of shooting in HDV, but there were a few reasons we decided against that route. First, although HDV records in a higher definition than DV, it is compressed with an mpeg codec. I wasn’t sure about how it would hold up to doing frame-accurate editing. Also, it hogs up alot of rescources while editng, and so with my puny iMac G5 I needed to be as tight as I could be.

The cameras, however took some beautiful shots in SD DVCAM.

We cheated a little bit, and made the band perform 4 times, and only once in front of a crowd. For the crowd shoot, or the ‘live’ night, we turned all the cameras around and did alot of shots showing the band with the audience. The three other performances were when we got all the tight CUs and solos of the guys on stage.

This meant that we were editing a 16 camera live performance. We weren’t really trying to go for total continuity, or the “Carols by candlelight” look. Instead we wanted to treat each song like its own music video, get a certain mood and feel for each one. This is also why we didn’t live video mix on the live shoot.

With 16 cameras, we had plenty of shots to play around with. I ingested each song separately from my own Sony PD 150 to a Maxtor 300 gig via firewire, and that worked reasonably well. I aslo ended up using Final Cut Pro to edit it.

I received a copy of the audio master of the concert from the band and synced each camera up to the corresponding song in its own sequence. As we were using different performances, of course the song was played faster or slower each time, but we just dealt with that as we edited it. If a clip was out when we needed to use it, we just synced it back up. In hindsight, getting the band to use a click track would been the right idea.

Here is a bit of an idea of the desktop. The shots are color corrected, so that’s why they look pretty dope.

I’ll post more about the DVD authoring processes when we are up to it.

Well, its been really busy here at the funklab. We’re trudging through the Sons of Korah DVD, with only about 5 songs left, plus all the DVD authoring. A whole lotta fun editing, but boy, what a lotta work. Soon I will be able to see my wife again.

Right now, djp and I have just finished colour correcting psalm 137 [babylon]. We’re onto ingesting psalm 148 and are havin a laugh listening to the latest diggnation.
Kevin and Alex. Funny guys.

On a geekier note. I’m finding that doing the colour correction in Final Cut much easier than I thought. Previously when I would use premiere I would output to After Effects and do all my colour correction there.

Now, on a mac with FCP the color correction tools are vastly superior and produce (IMHO) a better looking picture. Using this workflow has increased our productivity immensly. We just churned out a song and finished correcting each shot in about an hour.