Last summer I did an IMAG gig in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and we went for a three-screen setup. One main central screen and two side screens, with the side screens getting a separate feed from the central screen. It was a big event so we wanted maximum impact for the IMAG setup.
There were seven cameras set up as follows:
Two large studio cameras at FOH, one for solos and one for group shots
One DV cam at the side of the seating area for a side angle on soloists
two DV cameras at either side of the rear choir seating
One locked off DV cam at the back of the stage as ‘conductor cam’
One mini DV cam on a remote Pan/tilt head for ‘guitar cam’
In addition there was a PC graphics feed, and the projectors were 5k lumens on the sides and 6500 lumens on the centre (all Sanyo)
We set them up so that the centre screen did all the soloist and group work and the side screens were mainly instrumentalists, choir and conductor shots.
In addition we wired the two vision mixers (Panasonic MX50 and AVE55) so that the centre screen output (MX50) could also be fed as an input to the side screens (AVE55). This meant that we would choose to have all thee screens with the same shot (or graphic), or split them to be different feeds.
I’ve done this kind of setup before and it’s a real brain-twister to get your head around the setup and to be able to concentrate on driving two different sets of screens at the same time. This time I decided to try something different and ended up having two people vision mixing, which was a first for me.
I operated the centre screen mix and directed, while my trusty colleague (who has done plenty vision mixing on his own) operated the side screen mix.
So, how did it go?
Well, you can judge for yourselves on this rather wobbly handycam footage shot by one of the artist’s associates
and here’s another clip
Overall I was very happy with the results over the three nights – the first night was solid but not exceptional, while by the third night we were hitting all the cues and really working flawlessly.
I would highlight a number of important factors that make this kind of thing work:
We had prepared a detailed breakdown for all songs of intro details, solos, instrumentals, etc. all laid out in an easy to read form.
We had a full rehearsal and 3 nights of concerts to build on, so we had a chance to make notes and improve.
We were located in a separate room so could communicate easily.
My colleague and I had worked together many times, knew each other’s styles and had a certain intuitive way of working together.
We avoided both cutting to different shots at (or near) the same time, as that was too hard to sync and looked a bit weird.
We paced out the show so that we didn’t over-stretch ourselves, i.e. the first three songs were the same on all screens, then we split for a couple, then song words on all three – etc. Just enough to break it up and to give the audience a range of stimulus so they wouldn’t get bored with it.
We also had very good camera operators who coped well with having two voices in their heads calling shots (and sometimes disagreeing!!)
Since then they have expanded the range to include analogue VGA units, digital DVI units and also a 3-way unit called (unsurprisingly) the triple-head2go
Well I finally got hold of one on ebay (if you wait long enough, everything becomes affordable!!) and tried it out at a recent live event. It pretty much worked exactly as you would expect.
Projector setup was two Sanyo XP100 6500 lumen projs back projecting onto two 10′x7.5′ screens cable-tied together.
We were then driving the Matrox box from a MacBook Pro which was quite happy dealing with a single 2048×768 screen, and running VGA cables to the two projectors. It was important that the two projectors were the same make and model so they matched pretty well without too much tweaking.
We used Apple Keynote as the main display software, dropping pre-rendered 2048×786 quicktime h.264 movies into Keynote and playing them back to the VGA output.
Movies were created in Apple Motion, using a combination of custom motion graphics and also some HDV video and high res stock photos from iStockphoto.com cropped to fit the screen aspect ratio. For ’sing-a-long songs’ we put words up on both halves of the image (i.e. both screens) to make sure everyone could see them.
It all worked remarkably well. The superwide movies played smoothly and we even keyed song words over the top of movies in Keynote which looked very slick. We got lots of positive comments from audience members.
Here are some shots of the stage showing how it looked.
large still used as backdrop
big closeup still on back screens
We had no real issues, except that we were using a longer USB cable for the power to the matrox box and got a little bit of banding on the screens at times, so for again I might look at getting a separate power supply for it.
So there is a super-cheap way to get a widescreen effect for graphics.
Hey – don’t all die of fright, but I’m posting a new post here again.
I won’t bore you with a detailed explanation, but suffice to say that a young family and a new job in a different city, house sale, purchase, rennovation etc. etc. meant that VLOBLIVE posts weren’t high enough up my priority list to surface for a long time.
Anyway – enough excuses – how about a post, you all say…
Well I was finishing off a video for showing in a Church today and the church in question had a rather limited video projector – I think it’s around 2000 ANSI lumens and it doesn’t cope too well in strong sunlight.
I was thinking how to colour correct for this and thought I would note down my musings here.
I don’t usually post ‘hey look at this on the web’ type posts here at VLOBLIVE, as I like to focus on content, but this one is too good not to pass on.
Ever wondered what the throw distance of a projector is, or how the brightness is affected by the screen size etc. etc.
Pretty much every numerical calculation required to spec out a new projector is shown in the wonderful projector calculator at Projector Central .
Read on for more info on why this particular interactive calculator is so useful
There’s a growing trend in live and installation video circles to move towards the use of Cat5 twisted pair networking cables for long video and VGA runs.
As with many new technologies, it’s easy to get caught out, so read on for a quick primer from an engineer’s perspective…
iTunes is a great music player app for organising your music library and buying tunes from the iTunes store. However with a few very simple tweaks it can be a very effective live audio and SFX playback system. Read on for more details…
In case you are wondering why things have gone a bit quiet here recently, I should mention that due to a new arrival in the family VLOBLIVE activities have taken a lower priority for the moment.
If you create video content on a Mac, but you need it to be played back on a PC at a live event, you may run into the situation where you are using a PC app that doesn’t play back .mov files (yes, it happens – especially if the app is built on the windows media player framework….like most PC song projection apps are!)
Here’s a rough and ready guide to recording ‘fly-by’ videos using the popular Google Earth application. This can be great as an introduction video for someone visiting an event from elsewhere around the world or as a backdrop to a phone interview etc. I have found it is much more engaging than a simple map slide.
If you are playing back video clips directly to a projector from a PC or Mac, and the clips are interlaced video, then you have probably seen the ‘jaggies’ effect where fast moving edges take on a comb effect, due to the two fields of the video capturing the motion at slightly different times. Here’s some suggestions for how to get rid of that distracting effect.
With the size of media clips, graphics files and even powerpoint files growing larger all the time, transferring these files electronically is becoming more of a headache.
Here’s some suggestions for reducing the headache for you and your VLOBLIVE clients…
Here’s a quick tip on exporting still images from an HDV video sequence. There are various occasions where this might prove useful. The one I came across recently was needing stills to add to the cover of a DVD of an event. The HDV format makes this slightly less than intuitive, so read on for a quick guide.
With the increasing popularity of widescreen TVs and DVDs, it’s hard to find an LCD or DLP projector now that doesn’t have a ‘widescreen’ or 16:9 aspect ratio mode.
Coupled with this is the increasing number of cameras and camcorders that are either true 16:9 (HDV) or have a widescreen mode, and the idea of ‘going wide’ can seem quite attractive.
So how can you get best use of these features for a VLOBLIVE gig?
I recently did a gig where we used the built-in remote control pan/tilt/zoom cameras in the venue to do IMAG. The gig was a big (250 people) choir with a very small band and some soloists and speakers etc. Audience of 1000 on two nights.
Using PTZ cameras is becoming a popular configuration in some church installs due to the low visual impact of the PTZ cams compared to manned cameras on tripods, so I was curious to see how well it would work for a live switched IMAG gig going to the projection screens. Read more to see how it went…
HDV is the new buzz in video circles – it seems to offer the impossible; High Definition video at the price (and datarate) of Standard Definition. Great for low budget video production, but what about VLOBLIVE gigs? Should you care? How can you make use of all those extra pixels?
Read on to consider some of the issues raised by this new video format…
One of my quests is to find inexpensive software that works well for playing playlists of video files directly from a PC or Mac. Here’s another contender: AV Player HD from Neuromixer
If you ever have the need to play Flash animation files (SWF) inside a Powerpoint presentation, then there’s a hard way and an easy way. Here’s the easy way – SWF Point Player from GlobFX . Read more to see how it solved our problem…
You have maybe seen cheap pro analog video mixers for sale on ebay or elsewhere for knock-down prices.
Just be careful that you know what your are bidding for/buying…
In the kind of budget range most VLOBLIVE gigs are operating, your camera choice is going to be limited to pretty much whatever you can get your hands on. However if you do have some choices, or if you are
looking to invest in purchasing some cameras, here are some pointers to help you choose.
Recently we have started using the Basecamp online project collaboration tool to plan live video events and it has been very successful. Here are some questions and answers about that product and how it might fit in to a live video event planning.
This site contains my personal views, ideas, tips, tricks and rants about doing live video, IMAG or graphics at live events on a very low budget. They are published as I get time, in a style closely approximating a weblog.
Posted by drc 
Posted by drc 
Posted by drc 
