Onsite Workflow

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.

Guitar maker/picker Wayne Henderson, who counts Eric Clapton as a customer, appears in one of multiple sequences I edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.

That sealed the deal for OnLocation and Windows, and fortunately, I still had an HP Compaq 8710p Intel Core 2 Duo-based notebook, which Chuck used to record the concert footage in the school auditorium. I brought an HP xw4600 quad-core workstation with monitor for my use in the less-cluttered interview room.

The next question was how to efficiently process multiple videos in near realtime, each containing a standard bumper and trailer and a custom main title identifying the group or individual. The day before the concert, I created the default sequence on the xw4600 in Premiere Pro with bumper, trailer, and proforma title. I saved all the components into a bin in the project window, then duplicated the bin 16 times.

Then I numbered and labeled each bin and sequence and customized the title. I then used Premiere Pro's project manager feature to copy the project to the 8710p over my office network, ensuring that all title-related content transferred to the notebook. During the event, all we'd have to do is trim the captured video, drop it into the sequence, then render a DV file, which would take only a few moments.

From there, the plan was to dump the DV files to either Sorenson Squeeze (which was loaded on the 8710p) or Grass Valley ProCoder (which was loaded on the xw4600) for encoding-to-streaming format. This was our final technical decision. The files would be played from the Blue Ridge Music Center's web server, which meant progressive download only. I learned that the interface plan for the web files was a simple text link on the concert homepage. That pretty much ruled out Flash, because few non-technical users can play FLV files, and I didn't want to spend time creating SWF files.

I went back and forth on Windows Media vs. QuickTime H.264, and I ultimately chose Windows Media — which offers slightly better quality at lower bit rates and is slightly more familiar than QuickTime. Ultimate target parameters were 480×270 resolution at 24fps with a data rate of 400kbps and 64kbps audio, mono for the interviews and stereo for the concert.

The plan was set; now we had to execute. Fortunately,New Year's Eve was a quiet affair for me, and I woke up on the day of the shoot in unusually good shape for a New Year's Day. We carried our equipment down to the Fries Middle School and started setting up.

I set up for interviews with my XL 2 in a conference room just off the auditorium. I brought a light kit to use, but I decided against it because of the sheer number of interviews, with a varying number of participants — from two to six. Because I was cameraman, director, soundperson, and key grip, I wanted to limit the number of things I had to mess with between each shoot. To optimize lighting, I set up the interview area so that my interviewees sat about 3ft. behind a bank of fluorescent lights that were shining on both their faces and shoulders. I shot against a painted white wall that was in relative darkness, because well-lit reflective surfaces can look awful after compression.

For audio, I toyed with idea of using lavalier mics for each interviewee, but I cringed at the thought of miking, de-mikingand testing audio for 30 to 50 individuals over a 6-hour period. Plus, a handheld mic felt right for the concert environment: You know — for that ad-hoc Entertainment Tonight look and feel.

Setting up for the concert shoot, we couldn't situate Chuck near enough to the soundboard to capture audio from the sound system — which we realized, in retrospect, was a critical error. On the other hand, working in the auditorium, Chuck mastered the workflow and produced his videos in realtime, or about one 5-minute video every 20 to 30 minutes.

Back in the interview room, I started off pretty well, but several forces conspired against me. For one, while the concert schedule was set, the interview schedule was flexible and opportunistic — which meant interviews were lasting up to 12 minutes and sometimes I filmed multiple interviews for one group. The interview room also became a resting spot for post-performance musicians. Folks wanted to chat and ask about what I was doing and such. You know — that whole irritating “neighborly” thing.

I kept up OK during the morning period, but as the music transitioned from gospel to old-time to country to rock and roll, my little cubby next to the stage became louder and louder, and my concentration suffered. During one 40-minute period, I shot about 30 minutes of interviews, and then never got caught up.

So I carried both computers home without rendering to final format. Once it became clear that I would be working on the videos for a day or two, several other considerations came to the fore. For the music videos, it was obvious — the sound guy had recorded audio from the soundboard toCD-ROM, so there was no sense in publishing with sound captured via the XH A1 microphone.

For the interviews, the overall exposure was good enough to ship without adjustment, but who can resist messing with contrast and brightness when the deadlines have already been missed? Certainly not me. More serious was the one major drawback of the handheld microphone: inconsistent audio volume. So I spent about 5 minutes per video, manually normalizing audio within the peaks and valleys of the interview volume. In the end — despite our planning, preparation, and the direct capture via OnLocation, which saved us oodles of time — I still spent multiple hours swapping the concert audio, fixing various things in post, and encoding after the concert.

While my efforts were only moderately successful, at least from an efficiency standpoint, the concert itself was a huge sensation. More than $25,000 was raised through tickets, bake sales, cafeteria sales, and other contributions. But the benefit of the concert went far beyond the money that was raised. For one long day, an entire region came together, drawn by the music and concern for their neighbors, and the goodwill and good cheer was nearly palpable. I got to capture and preserve that feeling, which is always the best part of the job.

To comment on this article, email the Digital Content Producer editorial staff at feedback@digitalcontentproducer.com.