Just before covid I was working on a performace our band did at a theatre where we'd managed to record multicam and have a multichannel feed from the audio mixer. During the shutdown - the main project got lost, as I had some files, the audio files were coming from sound guy and the cards from two cameras went missing, the appeared. The upshot was I started to label things but made a huge mistake in the labelling - so pandb3, dandb4, dandi5 seemed a good move to mean paul and ben 3 for the third song - but at some point I copied all these to a common folder and discovered the mac noticed there were lots of duplicate names so it added a suffix and there were hundreds of small clips too - where I'd gone through and to make things easier I'd cut out the quick camera swings and refocusses in the timeline and saved out the result - but with no project file I can now find to put back the gaps and rebuild the timeline. I'd written the project off. I rediscovered the files on an old drive and have been painstakingly listening to each clip and then putting them in new folders, one for each song. Today, I started to rebuild the first one. I had one wide angle that ran start to finish, and with this and the heavily distorted camera mics on the closer cameras, I managed to place each little clip in the right place on the timeline. Manual sync by drumsticks (good), fingers on guitar necks (not so good) and our mouths!
Clearly some had been lost - the keys clips vanished half way though, but I'm assuming the gaps are where rubbish was cut, rather than lost excellently shot stuff. The centre line cam used for closeups was nowhere to be found, so I did without. In the end, I'm quite pleased, as the audio is pretty decent and was continuous apart from right at the beginning where the count in is clearly from the wrong mic - and the really one has a fade in applied I can't undo - as it's the edited version not the original raw track.
The reason for doing it is personal to us - the band leader - Ian the keys player passed away, and we decided to call it a day - none of us had the heart to replace him, all been mates too long. Anyway - this is the result of a crazy edit - I think it's pretty OK really considering it was like a jigsaw.!
April 4th, 2023, 03:06 PM
