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Promo of soundscape event, made with GH2 using very diverse audio and video sources
  • This is an example of what you can do with a lot of diverse sounds and images when you have very little time to capture stuff live.

    It was done with no budget as I was already there as a performer. I was playing in some of the audio from high up in the cathedral during each performance as well as playing the closing organ piece (which involved a LOT of running up and down spiral staircases in between!), so I had to grab material whenever I could. I took quite a few stills between performances, and during performances I took video and used frame-grabs from those (as I didn't want the shutter sound disturbing the performances). The only native video sequence is the female singer (distant shot during performance 2, and I got some CU shots and audio from the GH2 when she ran through the performance again for me in a lunch break).

    All the stills were processed in either Lightroom or directly in Sony Vegas as I needed to get it done quickly while doing a lot of other projects. The only other image processing is curves and defocus in Sony Vegas.

    Lenses: 14-140 (original version) for female singer distant shot, Ozeck 28mm 2.8 for close-ups of singer. Lumix 7-14 for most of the other shots. Patch: Cake Audio: GH2 onboard mics for the singer, Zoom / 2 x Neumann KM100 for the organ (spaced about 4m apart across the nave from the instrument), Sennheiser 318 gun mic for the ticking clock, and bells and construction sounds recorded on a Roland R-09. The early English prayer was emailed to us by the performer, and the thunder was specially-created by me for a play in 2005, using aluminium foil, slowed-down. The narration throughout was taken from a BBC radio interview recorded earlier that week and grabbed online during the live streaming.

    Quite complex sound mixing. The narrator audio is compressed and quite narrow-band, the rest of the sounds have quite extensive frequency response, so on devices with small speakers (with a limited frequency response) the narrator is quite clearly audible, and on big speakers, it is a more natural mix with the music a bit louder and the narrator more naturally placed. The bells sound is cheated with EQ and reverb to sound like it's inside and then crossfaded with un-EQ'd sounds when we go outside.

    The vimeo version is at 720p but you can download the original 1080p file if you like. The original is mostly stills or stills which are being tracked, therefore I didn't need a hugely high data rate to encode the video, and it created quite a small file. It works well (download the original if you like) and was a great way to create something with just a limited grab-bag of materials. Took about 4 hours to edit once I'd gathered the material and had a play.