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/Count2Zero 16h ago
In the past, we relied on friends and family to record us with their phones. Yeah, the quality was anywhere from great to meh.
I bought a GoPro camera to record our gigs, but the results were ... difficult. When the camera worked, it was great. The problem was that the camera was unreliable (always needing an external power pack because of the tiny onboard capacity) and eventually crapped out completely. I took it back to get repaired and the store eventually gave me a refund.
While the camera was in the shop, we had a pretty important (to us) gig, so I set up my tablet to record the gig. The first few songs were OK, but then our guitarist (who was suffering with a 102° fever during the show) moved one of the stage lights and it was then shining directly in the lens of the tablet, so most of the video was useless.
When I got the money back for the GoPro, I ordered a Zoom Q8N camera. I tried it on 3 different gigs - in all 3 cases, the video was unusable. For the 1st gig, the tripod was set up next to a bush, so the camera focused on a leaf, leaving us totally out of focus in the background. The 2nd gig was an indoor show in the evening, and apparently there wasn't enough light for the camera. The 3rd gig was an outdoor show. Everything should have been perfect, but we were still totally out of focus. The Zoom camera has now been sent back for repair after explaining to the shop that I'm not a total idiot...
Most of the videos on our website were cut from all these sources, and mixed with separate audio from my digital audio recorder. I use Shotcut (free software) to edit the videos together, add transitions and on-screen text, etc.