I danced yesterday, and I posted the video today. Here's the sequence.
Mostly I go to dances to dance. But I knew that this hall had great daylight, and is probably the prettiest dance venue in the Northwest. I brought the gear and "sat" out two dances to make a video instead.
Before the dance started I figured out how to get a feed from the soundboard to my Zoom H4N digital recorder. That became my base audio track. I turned it on and ran it for the duration of the first set, so it needed no further attention.
Now that I have two 5D's, I can do dual cameras on a scene. One I put on the balcony on a tripod, and started it at the beginning of the dance. The other camera I roamed the hall and captured the musicians and band. A dance lasts about 10-12 minutes. I can video during the bulk of it, and have lots of material to compose a 2 minute piece.
I'm looking for details. I want musician shots, I want expressions, I want the dance from different angles. I try and keep the camera steady for at least 16 beats of music before moving to a different view. I know I'm going to chop and recombine later.
I'm using PluralEyes to sync up my various simultaneous data streams, which spits all the sequences out in a new Final Cut sequence with everything supposedly aligned. I'm sure it works great with vocals, but it has a harder time with music. I usually have to manually tweak the sync. It's from that sequence, with the three synchronized audio tracks, that I build the final piece.
Once I have a rough layout down, I start filling in transitions and missing gaps with footage that is not in any way contiguous, but that fits the sequence of the dance figures. Actually, what I do is keep the additional footage's audio track temporarily, and adjust the clip to fit with the master audio. Once it's aligned, I delete the extra audio. That way it feels like it's happening when it should be.
A technique to make syncing easier is to listen to a clip, and keep time on the "M" key. That puts markers in the clip. If I just align the markers from different clips, its usually perfectly in sync.
Making these dance videos is my way of getting more fluent with video and Final Cut. I'm getting faster at it as a result--this project took about 5 hours to edit. There is never a time when I don't go, gosh, I wish I had done that. That's the point--this is a safe place to make my mistakes. And I love that I can share these with a dance community that gives me such deep joy and bliss.
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