Equipment Questions

[bbell77]

Hello,
I'm looking to make some good quality live music videos of myself and some buddies playing music. I want to take footage from 3-4 different camera angles, does anyone have any recommendations on good cameras to look into that are relatively cheap. I had thought about using the cameras on my iphones and ipads, but someone told me that would be a bad idea because of frame rate differences. I don't want to have problems syncing them up. Will be putting the camera footage together to create single videos of the multi-camera angle footage in the end through some sort of editing software.

Also, for the cameras you recommend, is there a place that you recommend getting them from.

Thanks in advance for the responses.

B.Bell

[smrpix]

Go to the B&H Photovideo site and look under camcorders. They have very good online tools for sorting and comparing. They are also an excellent, reputable seller with very competitive prices when you are ready to buy.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/
No personal affiliation, just a big fan.

[Cornucopia]

Yes, B&H is good, as is Adorama, and Sweetwater is good for Audio, and Markertek is good for accessories/cabling/etc. Those are only occasionally the most economical, though.

@bbell77, why are you starting a new thread? This seems like a continuation of your other thread.

To help, we'd need to know generally what your budget is (per camera or total)...

First, however, I want to show you what I was referring to WRT VFR & multicam editing:


This is an example of editing with multiple framerates. Note that these are all CFR (constant framerate), but all that means is that they are less complicated than VFR (variable framerate), which your originally-intended cellphone cameras (regularly) use.
This is an edit timeline with 5 streams: 30fps, 25fps, 24fps, 15fps and 4fps. And cut lines in Red and Blue. The Blue shows a point at which you can cut to where all the frames' durations line up at the same point in time so you can cleanly cut/add and maintain sync. With these CFR frames (and when starting at the same instant), you will likely only get a good (blue) edit point once every second or so (depends greatly on the framerates chosen). Most other points in time will be of the Red (bad) variety. See how there is no common place that allows cutting at the exact frames' durations? What will happen with a red cut?

Well, either
1. Nothing can happen because the editor doesn't understand this and won't allow it. - BAD!
2. You lose sync because the editor picks the nearest frame boundary point (earlier or later?). - BAD!
3. You end up with funky high or low momentary instantaneous frame durations because the editor is creating new resulting/remaining frame durations. - Weird and probably BAD!
4. The editor decides to pick a CFR rate that it will stick to and resamples/converts all the non-conforming frames to its rate so that it can do the task more straightforwardly. - quality-losing & bad (but maybe not as bad as the others)

Those are the options. Not very good ones, any of them.
Note also that even with CFR, and with Blue cuts, there will STILL be resulting framerate changes (so your edited clip is VFR itself), and the motion will have obvious moments of stuttering due to timebase jitter. Much like 24/30 pulldown but worse.

With VFR recordings, the number of blue moment possibilities is reduced and red moments increased. Bet that would be fun.

...oh yeah, and this doesn't even take into account GOP-based editing with its own problems!

Scott

[bbell77]

Hey Scott. Thanks for the response. This was in no way was intended to continue from my same thread as yesterday. I was really only asking about equipment. However, with your explanation above, which was great by the way, and all other things I've mentioned, what would you recommend that I do to achieve what it is I'm after as an end result, or a good approach to it. Good quality live music videos using no more than 5 camera angles worth of video footage then editing into single videos of a song?

Thanks again for being awesome,

[Cornucopia]

Can't give you a whole lot more without an idea of budget & timeline/deadlines, but...

1. Use cams that use CFR! (either real cams that rely on CFR, or VFR cams/phonecams that can be FORCED to operate ONLY in CFR).
2. Use identical Frame sizes, scan types & Framerates on all cameras. E.g. 1080p60
3. Use some form of clapper that can be recorded (seen+heard clearly) on all devices. Use it at the start and the end of EVERY shot.
4. (more advanced, but a huge timesaver) Think about using DSLRsync & feeding each source with Timecode
5. Make sure every cam has AT LEAST an embedded time stamp (most do, but some don't or are not included in the actual media), even if it doesn't use actual running timecode.
6. Upconvert all original recordings to a form that is eaiser to edit with (usually all I-frame ~lossless intermediate), but make sure that in doing so, you don't lose the timestamp.
7. If not using something like the "DSLRsync method", rename your intermediate files to be based on the timestamp. Verify that the timestamps are ALL starting timestamps (some use a different stamp: e.g. GoPros that spill over to 2nd clips). Something like "2014-09-18_16-34-00_Cam1.AVI"
8. Use only an NLE that can work with multiple cams & multiple simultaneous video tracks. Use a beefy new computer, with superfast HDDs dedicated to media (NOT the boot drive), hopefully internal. Think Lean & Mean fighting machine.

That's a start...

Scott

[bbell77]

Awesome. Thanks Scott. I appreciate you.