Am I going to hate myself for this??

I was asked back in December if I could provide video services at some of the horse events I shoot. I thought it was something I would be interested in exploring so I said "Maybe." I've spent the last six months working on building some skills and a small capable kit that I wouldn't feel too bad if it never made me any money. Well the time has come for me to actually do something.

I will be shooting a four day training clinic. There will be about 8hrs of shooting per day for all four days. The clinician will be working with individual horses and riders in one hour sessions and at the end of the last day, I will provide the riders with a DVD of their individual training sessions.

For audio, I ended up going with a Sennheiser wireless lav setup in a package deal with a Zoom H4N. I just ordered them this morning so I haven't had any hands on yet. I'm not planning to use the H4N on this job.

I'll be shooting with a pair of Panasonic HDC-TM90 camcorders which have 1/8" stereo mic jacks. The training facility owner, whom is sponsoring the event, wants me to provide an audio feed to his sound system so auditors can hear the clinician clearly. I am thinking that I can run the line out of the Sennheiser receiver into my Mackie Big Knob then bus a signal to the camcorder mic in and one to the PA. The only other mixer I have is a 24Ch Yamaha Digital O1x which I am not going to drag to a dusty barn/arena.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? The sound system at the facility is just a high power stereo receiver so there's no mixing capabilities there.

For the video, I'm planning to shoot in 1080p60 while monitoring on an HDMI out to a larger screen. My position will be stationary. At the end of each ride I'm planning to swap the SD card and save it down to an external HD connected to my laptop. I will need to convert the video to 720p60 so I can publish it to DVDs on the final day. I have Premiere Pro CC and Encore CS6 on my laptop so I am hoping to be able to multitask and have the video files converting while I am shooting. I am not planning to do any tweaks to the video other than change resolution and publish to disc. If I survive this, I will definitely shop for a camera with more options in the output resolutions.

For publishing on the final day, I plan to have the menu all made up in Encore ahead of time so I can just drop in each riders clips and burn the disc.

Does all this sound doable? Are there any giant pitfalls I'm missing here?

Bob

Sounds like my idea of hell. The DVDs are going to be mind numbingly boring and you are going to have to see them at least 3 times even with minimal editing. I don't envy you this gig at all.

Well, I don't know that it will be quite as boring for me as it would be for you. I've actually ridden with this trainer and he is very good. He is from Spain and has trained many horses that have gone to the Olympics. Since I also ride, I know what is going on and I do pick up tips that improve my skills.

That said, we are talking about 30+ hours of video over four days. It is my goal to only see the full footage when I shoot it. I have an 8 core processor in my laptop and I'm planning to convert the video with the Adobe Media Encoder bundled with Premiere Pro CC. They give the impression that it can assign a clip to each core for simultaneous encoding. I'm going to test this all out before hand since I have a couple weeks before this goes down. If I have to, I can split the encoding duties between my laptop and my desktop at home in the evenings. Of course, that doesn't really help with the last day.

Please, feel free to sharpshoot my plan. I really don't want to have any major issues when I show up to shoot.

Bob

How about the lighting? Is it going to be consistently good ambient light or will you be using some fill or reflectors? How long will your transmitter last on a set of batteries and does the signal level decrease with the battery level? It would suck to lose audio feed in the middle of a session.

J Michael wrote in post #16144577
How about the lighting? Is it going to be consistently good ambient light or will you be using some fill or reflectors? How long will your transmitter last on a set of batteries and does the signal level decrease with the battery level? It would suck to lose audio feed in the middle of a session.

I have no control of the ambient but my camcorders do have manual and program control. I've used them at this location before in different light conditions and I've always had good luck. As long as the horse and rider are properly exposed, the video is a sucess. There will be some blown out backgrounds and some deep shadows; it's unavoidable. Good question on the transmitter. I can change batteries between riders or when riders are taking a walk break so if I keep a good supply on hand, I should be ok. I am ordering an AC adapter for the receiver.

Bob

This project has become increasingly frustrating. I've done some tests and crunched some numbers and decided that I cannot make this work on DVD. I have two problems that contribute to the issue; lack of space on the DVD disc and long processing times to encode to something that will fit. At this point it looks like I need to produce a single disc for each one-hour ride. That means I will need to be able to author a completed disc during the time that I am filming the next ride.

I have been able to meet these requirements in tests by recording in AVCHD 1920x1080/60i and encoding to 1080/30i on a single layer Blu-Ray disc. I will also try encoding a disc in 1080/60i to see if that speeds up my processing times and/or improves the picture quality for fast moving subjects. It would be nice if I could record and author all in one format.

My camcorder only has two format options, both AVCHD; 1080/60p or 1080/60i at four different bit rates. Ideally, I would like to end up at 60p because I think that would present best with some of the quick movements of the horses so I may also test shooting in 1080/60p and authoring in 720/60p to see how that goes.

Anyone have any thoughts on the best way to proceed here?

Bob

I assume most would want a DVD not BluRay so shoot and compile for DVD. Everything will be faster......I still can't see how you are going to do it in the time though.
Even running multiple PCs, unless you have just one camera on a stand, and no editing (how rubbish would that look?) I can't see how you will do it single handed. You can't edit, compile and burn an hour long multiple camera DVD in under an hour.
I think the answer to your original question is "Yes" . It can't be done.

You are in a tough situation. Can't give any advice but good luck. Hope everything works out.

This is a mammoth video job even for a sophisticated video producer with top gear. As you have noticed, the key requirement that makes it hard is to edit and burn an hour long video to DVD in an hour. Its just not possible. The most important change to make with the Client is to make arrangements to send edited DVDs to the clients at a later date.

I would focus on quality video footage of the training from 2 camera positions and switch between them in the final video. If you run the primary camera as a wide angle view of the arena with the audio master, and then use the second camera for close ups you will have a much better end product. Run the B Camera as 1 continuous video so you can easily cut between cameras and keep synch. Use an assistant to help you copy video files to the computer so you can run cameras.


Don't forget the Senheisser G3 wireless needs fresh batteries every 4 hours.

Might want to have a backup microphone in case something happens to the lav.

I think you need to make life easier for yourself and look at a realistic delivery date.

There are a lot of things that could go wrong and it sounds like one minor failure will throw you off by quite a bit.

Also, have you tried that setup with the PA? Managing that as well is going to be a pain.

So I did this job. The clinic wrapped up yesterday. It kicked my butt! I was up at 4:00am every day and on site recording in 100+ temps for eight hours a day. There was no way to author discs while filming; I was barely able to wrangle the data myself. I will be producing the discs over the next couple days and should have them out to all the riders by the end of the week. I'll be distributing about half Bluray and half DVD.

On the audio, I ended up purchasing a small Yamaha mixer with built in compression and EQ. I'm really glad I did because the clinician refused to wear the mic if it was output through the PA. That means he frequently yelled to (or at) the riders and without compression my audio would have been a mess.

Overall, it was a good learning experience for me and it wasn't a big fail. I would probably do it again.

Bob