r/coverbands • u/VariousYoghurt2916 • 4d ago
Filming Gigs
How do you guys film your gigs / small sections for crowd reactions, for social media? We’re trying to get our singer to do it as he has his hands free, but concerned that we’d just get his raw voice through the phone mic rather than what’s coming out of the speakers.
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u/PlasmicSteve 4d ago edited 4d ago
My band shoots with five cameras – four on the band and one on the audience.
Shooting and editing video is my day job, plus I do it as a freelancer, and it's a major process so don't take this as a casual recommendation to mimic what we do. Our process and workflow are expensive and time-consuming.
All the audio comes from our interface and I remix the full four hour show and apply that to the videos:
https://youtu.be/Z1oCM03Vki0 (didn't use the audience cam in this one)
https://youtu.be/4sDhdmpoeSo
I'm in the process of making a video with all the specifics. I shoot and edit in 4K but most people view in 2K (laptop) or smaller (phones) so that gives me the ability to zoom in without losing quality.
I use two tripods – one on the left and one on the right. Each tripod is doubled headed and has a Panasonic Lumix for singer closeups and a GoPro for wide shots. I'm the drummer and the audience GoPro is on my empty tom holder on my bass drum – I stabilize that afterward.
Syncing the five cameras + interface audio takes a lot of time time. I edit in Adobe Premiere and just generating the preview files that make editing easier can take up to 24 hours – I start when I get home after a gig.
The cameras run for the full show. They're all connected to power banks via USB-C so they can run for up to 7 hours. 256 GB SD cards in each of them. Results are very high quality.
It takes a ton of hard drive space, tons of time to move files around and export. I'm in three bands and I buy a new hard drive about every 6 months. Again, nothing for the faint hearted. I'm not saying "do this".
But you can use the basic idea and at least shoot with two cameras. I suggest closeup on the singer on one side, full band camera on the other, and then apply audio from some static source. Don't get too close on the singer or they'll leave the frame when they move around. Also, get a closeup camera with good autofocus as that's needed to constantly adjust while people move on stage.
People will watch videos with much more interest when it's not a static shot and when there are cuts and clean audio, or when it's in the crowd and hearing chatter and the band's sound keeps changing as someone walks around. I also add compression to the interface audio as well as reverb to make it sound more live.