Song Video Production

[rsadasiv]

I've come to the conclusion that video will become the main publishing medium for DIY music (if it is not already). I am prepared to spend a non-trivial amount of time and money to get my videos to a publicly acceptable level, but right now I'm not even sure how to start, so I'm hoping that some of the good folks here can help me out.

 

Do you currently use video as your main publishing medium?

 

What level of capture/lighting/scene design/editing expertise does your audience expect?

 

What are some of your target models for video production (links pls)?

[Chicken Monkey]

Do you mean videos of the song being performed, or videos synched to produced recordings? This is something I know nothing about, save having done a few one-take YouTube performances, but I'm curious as to what direction you're going.

[rsadasiv]

 

Do you mean videos of the song being performed, or videos synched to produced recordings? This is something I know nothing about, save having done a few one-take YouTube performances, but I'm curious as to what direction you're going.

 

 

Both, probably. Whatever it takes to have a vibrant YouTube channel (or at least being able to post videos and not have people focus on how messy my basement is). The analogous situation is when I started trying to put mp3's online and the only non-friend responses I got were "your production sucks".

[kurdy]

I do have a YouTube channel, but I haven

[rsadasiv]

Ok, here is where I'm starting from:

I have a bunch of gear for capturing, editing, and producing audio. I've got a webcam. I have a old copy of Sony Vegas that I've used a couple of times for rendering and trimming. Way back in the day I did some work shooting, editing and projecting 8mm film.

 

Where I want to get to:

[video=youtube;h8uktqgKgw0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uktqgKgw0

 

[video=youtube;xycnv87N_BU]

 

and

[video=youtube;nms7a_X0cOg]

 

What I want to avoid:

Being some guy playing acoustic guitar in front of his webcam for nobody.

 

Put me on the right path.

[eeglug]

My first question to you would be: are you willing to spend as much (if not more) time developing your visual strategy as you do recording your song?

 

You should storyboard your video so you're not just making something that's just random crap thrown against the wall. Improvisation can work in music but not so much in video production. The visual story needs a flow and composition just as much as your song does. Then you need quality footage with actors (maybe just yourself), lighting, camera etc - unless you're going to go with some form of animation or still images and motion graphics. (The Oscar Peterson short is basically a stills and motion graphics exercise.) The footage you use probably ought to be uncompressed video, which will eat up disk space. Then you need a non-linear editor (like Vegas) to put it all together and consider how you want to render out the piece for upload.

 

There's a lot to think about and in the end your song is merely a soundtrack to the visual even when it's a music video meant to showcase your song. My advice would be to take this as an exercise akin to learning to write songs. Do it in baby steps and develop your skills as you go along.

 

PS. Don't just workshop your videos here. Go to a 'proper' video oriented message board and get feedback from people working in that field.

[blue2blue]

For the live stuff, I just put up my snapshot cam (which shoots acceptable vid, although the audio is on the thin side, not surprisingly) on a little cheapo tripod I bought online for 12 or 13 bucks. If I want it to sound good, I record an audio track simultaneously right into the NLVE (non-linear video editor software) I use, a consumer version of Sony Vegas,* using my normal recording chain.

 

When I have a take, I patch the cam over to the computer via USB, dump the vid into Vegas and then line them up.** If my cam could work over the USB as a computer cam (or I had a decent webcam) it would make things easier, of course.

 

Lately I've been rolling my live vids through one of the 'cartoonizer' type plug ins that came with Vegas. Less wrinkles and liver spots.*** By crackie.

 

For the full productions of my songs, lately I've been creating slide shows in Vegas using the 'auto-Ken Burns' effect (but actually just as a starting place, I usually tinker the pans and zooms on a slide-by-slide basis) and then running them through some of the included vid filters to make it look more exotic. It won't win any awards, but at least it distracts from my whiney, pitchy vocals.

 

 

Gluttons for punishment can find my YT vid channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/onebluenine

* I use the the 'premium' consumer version of Vegas, since it includes DVD burning and HD, though I don't have an HD cam; costs under $100 US; the pro version is supposedly pretty killer, but costs $600; they're both PC only but I think Mac folks do pretty well with Final Cut Express or iMovie.

**One proviso, since digital cams and soundcards are controlled by crystal clock chips that can vary in precision, it is possible to get a timing mismatch, sometimes a considerable one. For instance, my previous snap cam, a Nikon had rotten video, and really rotten sound (although it could take a decent still -- until the lens decided to not open any more less than two years after I spent close to $200 on it... I spent closer to $150 on a Cannon after that and it's a far superior camera), and between the Nikon and the cheapo Soungblaster clone chip built into the motherboard of my computer, there was a gap of several seconds by the end of a 3 minute song. Really annoying. The Cannon, OTOH, and my 'serious' audio interface (a MOTU 828mkII) are really close, so 4 or 5 minutes seems to not drift bad at all.

 

*** At least I guess that's what those are. Getting old is hell. In case no one has mentioned that before. I'm already way past the die young, stay pretty stage.

[rsadasiv]

 

My first question to you would be: are you willing to spend as much (if not more) time developing your visual strategy as you do recording your song?

 

 

I guess so. Given what I believe about the future of DIY music distribution I don't think I have any choice but to spend the time required.

 

 

You should storyboard your video so you're not just making something that's just random crap thrown against the wall. Improvisation can work in music but not so much in video production. The visual story needs a flow and composition just as much as your song does.

 

 

I'm a little less worried about this part (although I am sure I will learn many hard lessons along the way). I spent several years writing (spec) movie and tv scripts so I have some experience and aptitude for storyboards. I expect that storyboards have gotten much more detailed and that the tools involved in generating storyboards are much more complex, but it is not totally unfamiliar territory.

 

 

Then you need quality footage with actors (maybe just yourself), lighting, camera etc - unless you're going to go with some form of animation or still images and motion graphics. (The Oscar Peterson short is basically a stills and motion graphics exercise.)

 

 

I'm more worried about this part. I think that having a human face onscreen (at least part of the time) makes the audience more sympathetic towards the video. However, a quick review of my home movies indicates that my immediate family are not born actors and that I am not a great cinematographer. The lighting and sight lines inside the house are unattractive, but given that most of my free time is at night when I'm in the house I'll probably need to do most of the live actor stuff shooting myself down here in the basement.

 

I suspect I would like animation more. I'm not a bad photographer and I have an interest in drawing, painting and graphic design. I've been looking for an excuse to get a nice scanner, a Wacom tablet, Photoshop and Illustrator - is now the time? I've never done any animation - having to fill 30 frames every second feels like a daunting task.

 

 

The footage you use probably ought to be uncompressed video, which will eat up disk space. Then you need a non-linear editor (like Vegas) to put it all together and consider how you want to render out the piece for upload.

 

Disk is cheap. Do I need more than a few 2TB disks in a Firewire/USB enclosure? An upgrade to the latest prosumer version of Vegas? I don't think my rendering requirements are uncommon - whatever format youtube will screw up the least.

 

 

There's a lot to think about and in the end your song is merely a soundtrack to the visual even when it's a music video meant to showcase your song. My advice would be to take this as an exercise akin to learning to write songs. Do it in baby steps and develop your skills as you go along.

 

 

Point taken. I put 5 years and $10K into figuring out how to record audio. I'm expecting a similar level of effort for video.

 

 

PS. Don't just workshop your videos here. Go to a 'proper' video oriented message board and get feedback from people working in that field.

 

 

link?

[blue2blue]

It is so very hard to get feature-style acting right -- which is, for better or worse, what the gatekeepers expect if they see an acted out story line (that's not over-the-top goofy, of course) that I would suggest thinking extra hard before even considering it. Even if you nail it, what do you have? A cheezy video.

 

I loved the music video form in the late 70s... but by the time a year or two of MTV had come to pass, it was clear that the cool stuff was pretty much over and that the era of pantomimed storylines had set in.

 

I completely agree that video is one of the key ways forward, it's an important adjunct to the music, and can be a powerful promotional tool. Or it can be so horrible that it invites ridicule, even when the song itself might not.

 

The vids that I see working these days are quirky and often have the feel of low-key, personal videos, even when you realize midway through that it's shot in HD on a Red Cam.

 

Now, none of that is to suggest that eeglug isn't dead on about storyboarding the vid. A vid does tell a story (just don't act it out)... but I think the most effective vids (and probably the hippest, too) 'tell' that story abstractly. Lighting, rhythm of edits and cam movement, working synergistically with the music. I think that's why when you do see some sort of actors in a lot of today's vids, you see them in quick intercuts with the band, so we don't have to ever see them act... it's more like snapshots that limit the exposure to what would otherwise almost certainly be akward acting that draws attention away from the music.

 

 

In the 70s, I saw a lot of student films, including some very low budget features by first timers. Almost without exception, the films that worked eschewed conventional acting and storylines. And I like acting and storylines. But it's just damn hard to get it right -- even when you're a pro. (Hence all the intensely horrible movies that get made.)

 

PS... Not quite off-topic... but there's an MST3K that has a long sequence in a divey punk club with the band of some scene pals of mine from the 80s. Mike and the robots are utterly, go-for-the-jugular cruel to my friends's band. And they didn't even have many lines. (It was, actually, really funny. But it was kind of sad on some level, too, because by the time I actually saw the movie -- framed by the MST3K treatment, I was remembering the band's excitement of 12 or 15 years before -- when they thought getting in this movie was gonna be ticket to stardom.

[eeglug]

 

I suspect I would like animation more. I'm not a bad photographer and I have an interest in drawing, painting and graphic design. I've been looking for an excuse to get a nice scanner, a Wacom tablet, Photoshop and Illustrator - is now the time? I've never done any animation - having to fill 30 frames every second feels like a daunting task.

 

 

I assume you're talking 2D animation and not 3D. There are a number of ways to do it. You can draw frames by hand and scan them or you can use a Flash-like program and do it all 'in the box'. You'd draw with a Wacom. (Interestingly, a show like South Park - which you would think is just paper cutouts moving on a flat plane - is actually produced in Maya, a 3D animation program. I always thought it would've been done in something like Flash.)

 

For 2D animation, it's customary to 'shoot' your animation in what is called "Two's", meaning that you only actually draw every other frame and each frame is shown twice in your video timeline. So for a 30 frame per second format, you would only draw 15 frames per second. (One of my former animation bosses really frowns upon shooting animation at 30 fps because it just adds a lot of work. He does everything at 24 fps and then goes through a conversion to get a 30 fps final product.)

 

I've done a fair amount of 2D animation and it is definitely daunting work. Any kind of animation is an enormous task - even 3d animation, where the computer generates most of the frames. Feel free to ask me any questions you want and I can try to help where I can.

 

Another area for consideration which some are attracted to is stop-motion, a la Wallace & Gromit. A very painstaking style but can achieve some wonderful fun results.

[eeglug]

Another storyboarding tip which you probably already know: it's always helpful to create an animatic, which is just your hand drawn storyboard placed in the timeline of your NLE with your music as soundtrack. It should give you a feel for whether the visual story works or not. The aim is to nail things down as much as possible at the storyboarding stage because any errors of judgment here are exponentially costly later. You should know exactly how many frames you need for each shot so you're not overshooting or drawing unnecessary frames.

 

Here's an example of an animatic if you've not seen one before:

[video=youtube;37pQKgwsF94]

[Oswlek]

I primarily use youtube for my distribution, but the stuff you are talking about is beyond my skill level. I'd be happy to offer some direction if you need help getting part of the way.

[rsadasiv]

I've done a fair amount of 2D animation and it is definitely daunting work. Any kind of animation is an enormous task - even 3d animation, where the computer generates most of the frames. Feel free to ask me any questions you want and I can try to help where I can.

 

I write software for a living, and about 10 years ago (during a career hiatus after my dot com startup died) I thought about going into game programming. I had written some games as a kid in the 80's, and my coding chops were up to date, but it turned out that the state of the art had evolved to a point where it was impossible for one person to develop a title - you had to have an already fleshed out graphics framework and 30-50 people working for a year to get something out the door. So I went B2C (back to consulting) and spent the next 5 years writing various accounting systems .

 

So I understand that modern CGI/animation is a potentially huge task involving investors, teams of artists and vast server rendering farms. But that is really outside the scope of what I am trying to accomplish. I suspect that there is a DIY sweet spot in there somewhere, where individuals can use the vastly improved tools at their disposal to create compelling entertainment, and that is what I am trying to get to.

[rsadasiv]

I primarily use youtube for my distribution, but the stuff you are talking about is beyond my skill level. I'd be happy to offer some direction if you need help getting part of the way.

 

Actually, you were one of the people I was thinking of when I started this thread. What's your setup, how does it work for you, what do you wish you had known before you got into it ?

[Oswlek]

Actually, you were one of the people I was thinking of when I started this thread. What's your setup, how does it work for you, what do you wish you had known before you got into it ?

 

You're a little beyond where I was when I got started, but my biggest mistake was in my camera purchase. At the time, I was wholly unaware of even programs like Audacity, let alone Cubase, Audition, Pro Tools, Reaper, etc. so instead of buying a camera for the best video quality, I bought one that was the best overall quality.

 

For personal use, it was a fine investment. For video production I should have purchased something with the highest visual quality.

 

The software that I use is Adobe Premier Elements. It is a very diverse program that allows me to do just about anything, matting, blue/green screen, loads of effects, motion, transparency, what have you. It also is very inexpensive at $90 (when I bought it a little over a year ago). I don't have the first clue about animation, thought I don't believe you can do that within it, just import the file. The only downside of it is that it runs a {censored}load of CPU and tends to crash if you're trying to to anything else. Religious saving is a requirement because it will fail on you within your first 10 hours using it.

[Oswlek]

I should admit that I've been moving towards laziness in my video production. The peak in both complexity and time investment was this one I put together for a collab with a buddy of mine (his song)

 

[video=youtube;z87n51PvOnE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z87n51PvOnE&feature=channel_video_title

 

Granted, I was learning some of the techiques at the time, so it took a while longer than it would now. That said, this still would take me 15 or so hours to put together even now. (was well over 30 at the time) I have no illusions about the grand potential of my music, so I have a hard time convincing myself the investment is worthwhile. If I were playing out and really trying to make a career out of it, then even this probably wouldn't be good enough.

 

Part of what made this one so complex was the fact that his video isn't in perfect time with the audio he sent. All the time stretching was a bitch and at that time I wasn't aware that if you stretch something it moves everything afterward. So I did some stretching and moved on only to realize later that the whole vid was now out of synch. I couldn't just undo it because it would have taken more time to redo everything I'd subsequently done than just fix the timing issues. Of course, youtube then fudged up things that were previously OK.

[eeglug]

 

I suspect that there is a DIY sweet spot in there somewhere, where individuals can use the vastly improved tools at their disposal to create compelling entertainment, and that is what I am trying to get to.

 

 

I hear you. I'm not trying to discourage you but rather give you a realistic picture. It's totally doable to accomplish on your own and many out there do. It can be daunting but it can also be a ton of fun and enormously satisfying. I encourage you to experiment and try a little bit of everything to see what works and what doesn't. Take any instrumental piece you've done, take 10 to 30 seconds of it and do something visual with it.

 

PS. I was once a programmer as well, in the dying days of the mainframe.

[eeglug]

 

The software that I use is Adobe Premier Elements. It is a very diverse program that allows me to do just about anything, matting, blue/green screen, loads of effects, motion, transparency, what have you.

 

 

I've used the full version of Premiere as well as Adobe After Effects. The latter is considered more "pro" where Premiere is considered more "prosumer". But AE is horrible for dealing with syncing to audio. I actually much prefer to work in Premiere if I need to sync any footage to audio because it will play the project back to you in real time, whereas AE makes you sit and wait while it renders a preview into RAM. I've never tried Vegas but want to. The guys at work use AE or Final Cut Pro.

[Lee Knight]

 

 

 

^ that's awesome ^ fun

[rhino55]

Yesterday was the first day of shooting for the Red Couch Sessions. We put the same red couch in different locations and film song writers performing one of their tunes. One of the guys that plays with me serves as accompaniment.

 

The guys doing the audio and video guys are pros. It was a real pleasure to be a part of it.

 

I talked to the guys doing the av and they are going to help me make a good quality video for that ghost song that I posted here last week. Instead of shadow puppets, I'm working on lining up a dancer

[Lee Knight]

Yesterday was the first day of shooting for the Red Couch Sessions. We put the same red couch in different locations and film song writers performing one of their tunes. One of the guys that plays with me serves as accompaniment. The guys doing the audio and video guys are pros. It was a real pleasure to be a part of it. I talked to the guys doing the av and they are going to help me make a good quality video for that ghost song that I posted here last week. Instead of shadow puppets, I'm working on lining up a dancer

 

I'm going to miss those awesome shadow ghosts though! That was pretty cool.

[rhino55]

I'm going to miss those awesome shadow ghosts though! That was pretty cool.

 

Still staying with the shadow theme, but instead of stuffed animals, it'll be a dancer

[bee3]

I had nothing to do with this video, other than showing up and pretending to play... but I'm quite proud to have been a part of it. I think this video was really well done... curious what you think?

 

[video=youtube;eqrzJ71u3vE]

[Oswlek]

Are you even playing that song? At the :25 second mark it looks like you doing some fancy footwork but all I hear is a single note being played every couple measures.

 

Perhaps it has more to do with the mix, I can barely hear you in the chorus.

[rsadasiv]

 

Pro quality. Probably a ways off for me .