Tags
bell choir, bell choir video, Learning, music video, reflecting, reflection, video editing, video production
I mentioned in my last post about one lesson I learned working on the latest project I had: a Christmas video for my church. Now let me share one other lesson that may come in handy for a few of you. Well, probably not, but just in case, read on.
Music Videos
Much of the Christmas video project was editing previously recorded music. This included the need to make it sound a little better, add subtitles for some so viewers could sing along, or varying the view to make it a little more visually interesting. I mean, we weren’t really sitting in the church listening, so expectations were not the same while watching a video of the performances. You already read about my venture into trying to make a two-camera recording into four-camera raw video to edit.
But one other lesson you can keep in mind is about bell choir videos.
“The bells! The bells! . . . “
One feature of the Christmas video was our bell choir. They played an arrangement of The Wexford Carol by our Music Director, Dean Wagner. That was the one I caught myself behind the organ in the final video. Dealing with live music has challenges, but dealing with bell music in particular has its own challenges. You can see the bells starting at 27:00 in the video, if you want to see it before the other ‘spoilers’ below.
With any music video, it is best to record the song first (ideally in a studio) and use that sound track while recording video of the musicians “playing” the song. However, we had to do it the other way – record a live performance. Here, again, I tried using two cameras and record the piece twice to provide four angles to put into the final video. (You can read a few other details in Lesson 1.)
First:
I knew that Premier Pro could synchronize the audio of two or more videos so that editing it together is seamless. I’ve done that before, and I did it with the speakers for this video project. What I did not realize soon enough was that bell music does not have the distinct sound signatures that are needed for synching audio. Premier Pro could not do it.
So I had to visually or manually match the audio to the video images from each take when I switched views. That is a painful, time-consuming, and frustrating effort. I do not recommend it. If you ever do a bell choir music video – do it the “proper” way by recording the audio and having the musicians ‘fake it’ to get the visual – or just use one camera and don’t worry about creative visuals. The other option would be to have a multi-camera studio or mixer while recording it live to switch views, or be sure to have time codes to synchronize them. Both of these were beyond the budget of this project.
Second:
When I got a creative idea for the bell choir video, I should have backed off. But I liked the idea and wanted to do it anyway. I wanted to show ALL the bells being played at the same time, each musician on screen. You know, like you see in the ‘virtual choir’ videos. It is relatively simple to do as a video edit, so I wanted to go for it. What could go wrong?
I chose two measures where all the bells were playing during this arrangement. I told the director and players what I wanted to do. Now, in order to do this, I would have to make them play the two measures 12 times – so I could get one close up of each of them in the bell choir. They were game!
The director is a trained and experience musician, so I figured he could keep the pace or tempo the same every time we played it. Well, kinda, but not really, I discovered. Even in two brief measures we ended up with about one second difference in some of the takes. Add to that the fact that Premier Pro could not synchronize the bell audio, and you can start to imagine the difficulties multiplying for me as I tried to put them all together in one video sequence.
Using 12 different layer of video (one for each player), resizing each to a smaller image, and placing them in a different location on the screen revealed one more planning idea that I hadn’t done. Naming. Naming each clip before editing would have helped in placing each image. Instead of V000124, V000143, etc. I could have named the clip in such a way that let me know easily who was playing. Does it matter who was where on the screen? Yes and no. If you don’t care, you could put anybody anywhere. If you care what it looks like, you would prefer to put specific players in a specific location on the screen. And you should care what it looks like, so yes, it does matter.
My efforts to synchronize them all with the subtle variations was not really successful. If you take the time to listen and watch carefully you can see how some are not playing accurately to the actual sound. The multi-frame portion of the video came out looking ‘OK’ but has flaws. You can see that particular sequence at about 30:20 in the Christmas video. It came to the point where I had to decide how much time I was going to put into this two-second sequence in the overall 1-hour video, and how much time I had before deadline.
I offered to edit this out, but the director liked it OK, and I haven’t heard any complaints, so I guess I hid the flaws enough or it was brief enough nobody noticed or cared.
What did I learn? Among other things, I learned that to do a music video properly it is best to have the audio first and ‘lip sync’ for video. Also, before any editing, name your raw video specifically so you know what each clip really is by its name.
I’ll continue to reflect, as I discussed before, to see what else I learned from this project. And I hope I remember these lessons when I take on my next project.