Jason Levine – Healing People Daily with the Power of Digital Video & Audio

Max's first task was taking ALL of the video from my original multicam project and converting everything to a common format, frame size, and aspect ratio. This allowed him to process and correct across each camera, evenly. The ability of Premiere Pro to allow me to cut with multiple sources/multiple formats on the same timeline was absolute brilliance; but you don't want to deal with that during the finishing process ;) Once he'd transcoded everything, it was a matter of tackling each camera individually---first dealing with the noise and grain present on the DV and small-format Canon G9 & Tx1 cameras.

This can be seen in the first 'before' video, during the close-up on Chip's face. It's literally PURE noise; and though the Vimeo upload degraded some of the reds a bit...the entire clip was simply filled with red dots. It literally looked like 'video paint-by-numbers'...and this plagued nearly every shot on those cameras.

In short, Max performed 2 separate passes of noise reduction, applying some color correction and re-sharpening as well (in between processes) to bring out clarity in the image. Again, you can see the first pass 'after', and it's really quite dramatic. Indeed, we went for a more stylized look...but once final filters were applied, he knew it would be beautiful...and it was ;)

Following the noise reduction & edge detailing, color correction was applied and Magic Bullet Looks was used to give the overall sepia-toned Western look to the multicam cut (note: one of the coolest things about this whole process was that Max was literally able to swap-out my original clips for his modified ones; the multicam 'cut' itself remained in-tact, in-sync, and only a few tweaks were made to better some of the angles during the performance). With the look applied, Max did some additional filtering to add scratches, flicker, dust, and other 'old film' artifacts. Very appropriate, given the overall 'theme' of the music, and it's locale.

With Max tackling the video restoration process, I was tasked with remixing and remastering the audio. Initially, I was only working with the audio from the stationary HV30 camera; but as individual tracks were captured, I had the engineer deliver mono, 24-bit AIFF files to me, and from there, I proceeded to clean them up, perform some stereo/ambience processing, and generally balance and equalize the mix.

Now, if you've ever heard live recordings taken from a soundboard, you know that they can often sound, well, not live! That's simply because there's very little bleed into the stage mics from 'off-stage'. And in our case, we didn't have any room mics captured, and the bass and guitar were actually captured direct (ie, from an internal pickup...yikes) So the real challenge here was to recreate the sound of the room, placing each performer (and their instrument) into it's own 'ambient' space; bringing out the live, natural sound of the instruments (as pickups can often 'thin' the sound) and then place the overall group into a global ambient setting. Basic compression was used on each track, some classic tape-slap echo was applied to the vocals, and several different reverbs were used to put the band 'back' into the room. I also mixed in a bit of the stereo camera audio, just to add some additional ambience and color. Check out the original and the final to hear the differences. I think it's quite dramatic, and it really sounds 'alive'. Nice.

After that, it was simply a matter of re-synchronizing the audio back to the video. Again, one of the brilliant things you can do in Premiere Pro is change the timeline from timecode (ie, Frames) to audio units (ie, Samples). This is often necessary because with audio captured at 48k, that's 48,000 samples per second...and when you consider 29.97 frames per second; well, there's just a lot of audio that can occur outside of those 29 frames. So, the audio was seamlessly 'slipped' back in, and in seconds, we were in-sync and rolling.

The final step was to use the Media Encoder to deliver an H.264 master which is what you see on Vimeo.

This project really showcases what can be done with virtually no budget, a mixture of consumer cameras, and some CS4 know-how. And it bares mentioning again---none of this could have been possible without the brilliance of Adobe Clip Notes and AdobeSHARE. If you haven't checked out SHARE yet, GO NOW! Get yourself a free account, and start sharing your content (and creative ideas) with others. It'll change the way you work...forever.

Special thanks to Sunny Thaper, Jack Maverick, and Chip and Tony :)

For more on Chip Hanna (and more live tracks from the show), visit his MySpace Music page here.

Until next time,

Blog on.