Your Hollywood Smile

(1) with David Crosby

Baronet Media is pleased to share this multi-camera crowd-sourced concert video with fans everywhere.
REQUEST FOR FEEDBACK:
The disc has a Contributers Sub-menu. If I left your name off of it let me know and I’ll add it in a future update. A project like this a lot of work. If I’m going to do more of these, I’d love some feedback on what you like and what’s not working. I hope you enjoy the results. I'd be happy to send a physical Blu-ray disc to any contributor who's audio or video I used. Contact me and we'll work out the details.

ABOUT THE SHOW:
This was the first show on the North American leg of David’s Rattle That Lock tour. It was special in two other ways. The first is the special lighting effects projected on the Hollywood Bowl. The second is special guest David Crosby singing on several songs throughout the show. The special projections are amazing and played a big part in inspiring me to undertake this project. I was at the show and it was a blast.

ABOUT MAKING THE Blu-ray:
I thought briefly about doing a crowd-sourced video right away. I was dissapointed when I saw that clips of this show uploaded to YouTube were being taken down, blocked, or had their audio muted. I shelved the idea when I couldn’t find enough footage to cover the entire show. Then in late 2017 I discovered Yeeshkul members had collected / shared a good bit of video from the show. I found a bit more on various other sites and started putting everything together. I spent most of my free time for the next 14 months completing the project.

I collected about 105 video clips, there’s even one showing the fireworks launching from behind the Hollywood Bowl. Strangely there were very few shots from the left side of the audience. I’m hoping to update this project in the future. Let me know if you have footage you’d like me to add. I’m especially looking for wide shots of the bowl projections on Rattle that Lock and Faces of Stone. I could also use closer band shots for Run Like Hell, In Any Tongue, and The Girl in the Yellow Dress. Also, I’d love more close shots of individual band members, especially the keyboard players who are the hardest to see.

There were 4 excellent and complete audio sources available for this show. I combined the best two to create a stereo mix. As an experiment, I used the same sources to create an experimental 4.0 surround mix. One stereo source is front left and right, the other is surround left and right. I welcome feedback on how you like this surround-sound and what might make it better.

To put everything together I used Avid Media Composer’s group clips and multi-cam editing features. With Adobe After Effects I used the Warp Stabilizer and Camera Shake DeBlur features. There are artifacts around the edges of most of the stabilized shots. I felt they were an acceptable trade-off. I could have cleaned them up further but this project had to end sometime or end up ‘half a page of scribbled lines’.

Much of my time was spent syncing all the video clips with each other and the audio. The other huge task was stabiling the really shaky shots. There was one fan in particular who had a really close seat and a pretty good camera but he rarely held the camera steady. The other important steps were color correction to match the different cameras, and of course, choosing when to switch between them. I also spent some time in the early stages confirming that all the clips I had were from the correct show. David did a second show at the Hollywood Bowl the next night and many of the sources were not clearly labeled. To properly document this event it was important to me that everything be from the same show.

There are a few places between songs where I don’t have any video. Most of them are 10 seconds or less while the stage is dark so I don’t think we’re missing much. The only missing picture while the band is playing is the first few seconds of Run Like Hell which is odd because I had over 15 angles of the song. The only song with more angles was C-Numb.

BORING AUDIO SYNC DETAILS:
A note about audio syncing. When I synced clips by matching the audio I found that the picture was often off by several frames. I thought maybe I could blame the original camera or possibly additional video processing that these clips experienced when they were uploaded to various social media and file-sharing sites. My thinking was that something had shifted the audio/video sync on some of the source clips and that this accounted for the visual sync difference I was seeing. I also wondered if some of the clips might have an error in their frame rate which would make them play back slightly faster or slower than they should. My surprising conclusion is that the sync discrepency was caused by the speed of sound vs. the speed of light. My very rough math shows that a camera all the way at the back of the audience would get audio as much as 10 video frames later then a camera in the front row. This is based on 30 (actually 29.97) frames per second video. Sound travels a lot slower than light and I had to take this into account when syncing the clips.

Another sync issue is the video I-Mag on the large circular screen (known simply as Mr. Screen). I determined that Mr. Screen was delayed about 7 frames from what was actually happening on stage. I had to decide weather to try and compensate for this. In wider shots where Mr. Screen is really dominant and it’s obvious that the sync is off, I’ve advanced it 7 frames to put it back in sync. In shots where you can see the band directly as well as on Mr. Screen, I’ve kept the direct view in sync so Mr. Screen is 7 frames behind. Could I have ‘split the screen’ and delayed only the part of the picture showing Mr. Screen? Yes, but it would have been very difficult and you would be waiting many more months for this to be released. I had to draw the line somewhere. That said, everything on this disc is in-sync as if it were a live broadcast. None of the shots are ‘faked’ or ‘cheated’ I worked very hard to get it all in perfect sync and I’m proud to say I think I pretty much nailed it!

Dodano:  8.4.2019