It's fun to waaaay over deliver if you're shooting video; as long as you aren't the one who has to scrub through the footage and edit it...

 

I spread the smaller tripod legs wider to give the camera more support. 

This one was just put down in front of the audience, right between two loudspeakers.

Unobtrusive in the dark.

I love participating in reckless overkill. If one view of a concert is good then two must be better. And three might be excellent. And sometimes the fourth one is a charm. 

Getting assigned to shoot a series of concerts at Zach Theatre gave me an excuse to trot out an inventory of cameras, set them all at the same basic settings and let them rip. With the exception of the one camera I used to track the person performing and render them large and isolated, all the cameras were set up on various tripods, pre-focused and exposure set. I'd just wait until the person from fundraising came to the stage to make a plea for donations and then I'd hop around the plaza, turn on the cameras and hit the red "record" buttons. I'd linger for a moment to make sure each camera was rolling and that the image on the rear screen looked good and then scamper off to the next one. If my timing was good I was back at the main camera putting on my headphones and grabbing the pan handle on my tripod to catch the arrival on the outdoor stage of our gallant troubadours. 

Every time I do one of these events I learn something more. On the last go I learned that I actually could use the autofocus setting in the Panasonic GH5S. No, I don't trust any camera to lock on and maintain a flicker free, pulse free focus using C-AF on a moving singer for an hour and fifteen minutes but I was getting frustrated having to manually focus a long lens over and over again. I took to the web and found a good tutorial on video focusing with GH series cameras and put the new knowledge to good use. 

You probably already know this but if you leave one of the focus controls in the camera checked (continuous AF) the camera will try to focus all the time. Sometimes well and many times less well. And, of course, the camera rarely knows what you want to focus on...

But if you go into the menu and turn off the "continuous AF," set the external control to "S-AF" and enable touch focus control AF in the "touch screen" menu you can take advantage of the camera's ability to do single point AF well and the setting keeps the camera from re-focusing it until you want it to. 

Since my singers were mostly moving perpendicular to the main camera I could get the camera to focus quickly once and then stay in the manual setting until the singer moved to a different stage, or walked from a position in the back of the stage to the front of the stage.

While the singer was making a long move, like walking from the main stage to the secondary stage, I just panned with them and ignored focus until they hit the mark at which they'd remain (hopefully) while singing through their number. When they hit their spot I'd touch the rear screen at exactly the spot where their face was and the camera would hit that focus with authority ten times out of ten. And I would get fine focus confirmation from the focus peaking indicators on the Atomos monitor. Easy and accurate. And any gap of focus could be covered by one of three other views from the stationary cameras. 

It would be great to do one of these shows with a person operating each camera and maybe even add a fifth camera on a gimbal to get some camera movement into the shots. In my theater fantasy we'd have everyone on communication gear and we'd have a show director calling out to each operator to let them know which way to move or what camera adjustments they'd like to see. 

When we actually did shoot a show a few weeks back with four cameras we had each camera set up to shoot 4K video at 10 bits, 4:2;2. The data rate from camera onto the memory cards clocked in at around 150 Mb/s and when I transferred all the content from the memory cards to a hard drive I saw that each camera generated about 80 Gigabytes of files/content. The grand total of information I handed off to the editor was about 320 GBs. And that's just for one show.

I was kind though; I did put each camera's files into separate folders and labelled them with camera position information. I was trying to make it easier for the editor...

When I saw the video cut together and ready to stream I realized that while 80-85% of the footage was from the highly magnified, moving "follow" cam but that each of the other angles, even if used sparingly, gave the project an aura of higher production value. 

But I think I'm getting a little addicted to the possibility of covering the next concert with even more cameras. I'm considering hanging a small camera with a wide lens over the top of the band, etc. I think I'll back away from that a bit and spend a little more time going "old school" and maybe do my next project with just one camera. Can you ever really go back?

this little guy was riding on a Leica tabletop tripod.

The tape is for visibility. While the public doesn't walk through this 

area I wanted to make sure the talent could see this camera and 

lens over to the side and avoid any unfortunate collisions. 

Makes it easier to find for me at the end of the evening too.

The GX8 does nice 4K. And it doesn't have record limits. It only features .M4p instead of . MOV but 

that hardly matters in the big scheme of things. 

The center stage camera was an S1 with a Sigma Art 35mm f1.4.

Just right for a stationary shot of the main stage.

Unmanned and sitting on top of a Sirui tripod.

The footage from this camera was the second most used in the edit.

When the client and I first discussed this project their assumption was that we'd just continue doing what their previous videographer had done and set up two cameras side by side. One with a wide view and the other with a longer lens which could follow the whoever was singing at the time. But they just weren't considering the artistic director's propensity for letting his actors/performers roam the stage(s). I could see from the outset that we'd need more coverage. Good thing we have some depth to the gear inventory. 

I think though that we'd have to limit future camera proliferation to eight cameras per show. Max. If we did more than that I'd either have to start renting gear or pressing Canon G16 point and shoot cameras into service. Probably not very practical. Also, I think it would take too much time to turn everything on and off.

But if you've got them you may as well use them....

Fun to play around. Just glad I don't have to do the edits. I would never have enough patience.