had a stationary DV camera we hung from the ceiling and had a roaming HI 8 for the closer shots. double miked all instruments – one for live mix, the other for recorded tracks direct to CUBASE. mixed the dude down and synced to vid.

great posts (1 and 2) looking forward to 3. comments welcome
shane – ii ton

This is the author of this story, Keith, checking back in. I love all the comments this project has generated from you guys. The general concensus seems to be most readers found it helpful.

Based on some of the comments in response to this first part of the DIY Music Performance Video article (part 2 is just about to go up on Echoes…), I wanted to recap a few decisions we made in the pre-production process that came up in the reader comments to this part of the story. One reader pointed out that we used a stationary camera position for the 5:00+ song and suggested that having multiple cameras would have offered more variety and made the video more exciting. While this is true, a multi-camera shoot would have required more time and editing than our project allowed for. The purpose of the Sugar Water Purple performance video was to see what type of quality we could get sticking to a simple, one-camera, one complete take DIY approach.

Another reader questioned why we bothered to record the audio to a separate device, instead of simply taking the audio mixing board output and plugging it directly into the cameras. While this is certainly an option, the audio recording capabilities of most consumer-grade video cameras do not offer the type of headroom that will make for good audio reproduction. One simply has to look at the tens of thousands of self-made performance videos on YouTube where this approach was tried to hear poorly balanced or distorted audio tracks.

Alternately, using the camera’s on-board microphone rarely results in a decent audio track for a full band. If you are a solo performer with acoustic guitar and vocal you might get a decent result using the camera’s on-board mic, but using higher quality external mics and a separate audio recorder will always yield a better sounding audio track for a band. That’s why we chose to do a separate live audio mix to the Zoom recorder and match the audio and video recordings up in post-production. While we didn’t have quite as much control or the effects processing available on a studio recording of the song, the live mix came out clean and very representative of what the band actually sounds like live. This was one of the goals that the band was looking for on this project, to capture what they sounded and looked like in a live setting. Lip-syncing to a studio recording is another option that can work well, depending on the goal of your own DIY video project.