This video is our first attempt to record a jam session in 3 passes. So, with 2 people that means I played drums, tenor saxophone, and then soprano saxophone. Eric started on Novax CH8 (bass/guitar) and then played a lead guitar track followed by another guitar track providing background ambience.
I don't think it's one of my favorite jam sessions but it is musical enough and we didn't hit any sour notes (none that I could hear anyway), there's just nothing that stands out, except for the fact that in the video you see our clones, so I guess that's kind of cool. It would have been cooler if Eric had shifted seats for the third pass, if the sax cam could have been rotated left to get more of the soprano playing... But the most disappointing thing of all is the fact that the vsn mobil v.360 camera failed during the third pass because the battery had drained. We hadn't noticed that it turned off because it was plugged in. I had to hack together a custom tripod mount that left room for the usb cable. The v.360 wasn't designed to be charged while it is in use so I can't really complain too much. What I can complain about is how that thing has a mind of its own and no on-off switch. So the previous night even though I had switched it off via the iphone app I guess it decided to wake up and do summersaults all night so that it was drained before the jam even started.
I went with black and white because the colors looked pretty bad even with a heavy dose of color grading before I gave up on it. I think wearing black was a big mistake, but also recording in the daytime created another problem. I think the dynamic range was drastically reduced to deal with the bright hits where there was sunlight. And that crushed the blacks and removed any definition there might have been on my black shirt. So, I'm reduced to floating head and hands and saxophones. Well, I think it looks okay in black and white, I'm just disappointed that I couldn't get it to look good with color.
The audio mix could be better. There were too many tracks to try to keep them separate and I didn't think it was worth the time to automate the track levels to focus on individual instruments when they showed up on camera. Wow, is there anything redeeming about this video? Just a bunch of clones... I should have named it "gimmick", anything would be better than fuzz-simile. What was I thinking? The next video will be much much better... I hope.
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Friday, March 4, 2016
Fuzz Bucket - "Los Niños" 2/14/2016
For the latest jam video I got a new camera. It's a 360 degree camera called a VSN Mobil v.360 Sports Action Camera. I bought the camera because the specifications seemed to be pretty well suited for our jam sessions and one thing I've been trying to figure out is a way to get better coverage of all of the instruments. With this thing I can get an alternate camera view of each instrument and it also gave us a great shot of Eric playing Novax and guitar in the same shot.
The best thing about the V.360 camera is the price. It's cheaper than a gopro. But after running some tests, you end up getting what you paid for. Basically, it ends up shooting a lower resolution than any of my gopros. But one limitation is actually one of the things I like about this camera. It seems to handle low light in a clever way. It doesn't have a very fast sensor so low light performance is pretty bad, but instead of shooting extremely noisy footage at a high fps, it reduces the frame rate and shoots longer exposures. And this produces pretty satisfying video footage.
My favorite feature of this video is the shot of the two Erics playing next to each other. At first I was disappointed that Eric staged himself so that he would overlap. This meant a lot more work for me trying to composite the images together. But I ended up having a blast animating the masks, basically frame-by-frame because the end result was just so cool. But I did make a mistake by animating the mask for the whole video instead of only dealing with the footage that ended up on screen (which was very little). I would have saved myself so much time... lesson learned.
It was nice having Eric's kids in the background looking silly and cute. It's short and sweet and I love the way this came out.
The best thing about the V.360 camera is the price. It's cheaper than a gopro. But after running some tests, you end up getting what you paid for. Basically, it ends up shooting a lower resolution than any of my gopros. But one limitation is actually one of the things I like about this camera. It seems to handle low light in a clever way. It doesn't have a very fast sensor so low light performance is pretty bad, but instead of shooting extremely noisy footage at a high fps, it reduces the frame rate and shoots longer exposures. And this produces pretty satisfying video footage.
My favorite feature of this video is the shot of the two Erics playing next to each other. At first I was disappointed that Eric staged himself so that he would overlap. This meant a lot more work for me trying to composite the images together. But I ended up having a blast animating the masks, basically frame-by-frame because the end result was just so cool. But I did make a mistake by animating the mask for the whole video instead of only dealing with the footage that ended up on screen (which was very little). I would have saved myself so much time... lesson learned.
It was nice having Eric's kids in the background looking silly and cute. It's short and sweet and I love the way this came out.
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Fuzz Bucket - "Mongoose" 1/29/2016
Behind on my posts...
This jam happened on 1/29/2016, just a couple weeks ago... This time we tried a couple things differently. Eric mounted the gopro on the body of this guitar during his solo overdubs. Pretty cool view. I also selfishly aimed 2 cameras at myself for the sax tracks, one on the mic stand and the other mounted on the bell of the horn. I'm really digging the static mic camera but it's hard to give up the weird sax-mounted camera.
For this jam we recorded drums/novax first and then quickly recorded the overdub take on sax/guitar. My sax playing was heavily influenced by the Sonny Rollins DVD I was watching at work all day.
For some reason in the video edit I chose not to use borders between the split-screen views. Something tells me the borders will be back in the next video. Overall I'm really happy with the track and video.
This jam happened on 1/29/2016, just a couple weeks ago... This time we tried a couple things differently. Eric mounted the gopro on the body of this guitar during his solo overdubs. Pretty cool view. I also selfishly aimed 2 cameras at myself for the sax tracks, one on the mic stand and the other mounted on the bell of the horn. I'm really digging the static mic camera but it's hard to give up the weird sax-mounted camera.
For this jam we recorded drums/novax first and then quickly recorded the overdub take on sax/guitar. My sax playing was heavily influenced by the Sonny Rollins DVD I was watching at work all day.
For some reason in the video edit I chose not to use borders between the split-screen views. Something tells me the borders will be back in the next video. Overall I'm really happy with the track and video.
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Fuzz Bucket - "The Fourth Man" 1/15/16
Another jam video from the 1/15/16 sessions. The unique thing about this jam session is that it started as a sax/drums jam which was followed by sax/Novax CH8 (guitar/bass), where I played both sax tracks and Eric played drums and novax. So, if you think about it, the entire rhythm section (guitar, bass, and drums) was performed by Eric.
Unfortunately the bass track wasn't recorded so I had to pull the bass out of the room mic. One cool thing about this video is that I was able to composite Eric playing novax into the same shot where he's playing drums. Anyway, I hope you like the improvised saxophone harmonies and one-man rhythm section.
Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2 technical problems for anyone who might be interested:
I ran into an interesting issue with FCPX while editing and mixing the audio in another application. I like to keep all of the footage I'm using consolidated into the FCPX library file so it's basically portable. But sometimes while I'm still mixing the audio I like to keep the audio mix as a link so that whenever I do a remix it automatically gets updated in fcpx. And when I'm done mixing I just consolidate all of the files into the fcpx library file.
The problem I ran into was when I updated the audio twice in quick succession fcpx froze up for a long enough time that I decided to force-quit the application. So, what I think happened was that FCPX saw the first update to the audio and started processing the changes. While FCPX was busy with that, I started a new update and this put FCPX into some kind of endless loop where the spinning beachball cursor kept spinning and spinning.
After hours of experimentation this is how I fixed it. I renamed the audio file that was responsible for this endless loop and then re-opened the fcpx project. Now the audio file is missing but you get the interface back so you can fix it for real.
The next thing I did, and this is where my memory is a little foggy, I think I used the relink feature to link the audio back to the renamed audio file. Relinking to a new (or renamed file) was the key because simply restoring the missing file using the same name caused it to go back into the freezing behavior.
Unfortunately the bass track wasn't recorded so I had to pull the bass out of the room mic. One cool thing about this video is that I was able to composite Eric playing novax into the same shot where he's playing drums. Anyway, I hope you like the improvised saxophone harmonies and one-man rhythm section.
Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2 technical problems for anyone who might be interested:
I ran into an interesting issue with FCPX while editing and mixing the audio in another application. I like to keep all of the footage I'm using consolidated into the FCPX library file so it's basically portable. But sometimes while I'm still mixing the audio I like to keep the audio mix as a link so that whenever I do a remix it automatically gets updated in fcpx. And when I'm done mixing I just consolidate all of the files into the fcpx library file.
The problem I ran into was when I updated the audio twice in quick succession fcpx froze up for a long enough time that I decided to force-quit the application. So, what I think happened was that FCPX saw the first update to the audio and started processing the changes. While FCPX was busy with that, I started a new update and this put FCPX into some kind of endless loop where the spinning beachball cursor kept spinning and spinning.
After hours of experimentation this is how I fixed it. I renamed the audio file that was responsible for this endless loop and then re-opened the fcpx project. Now the audio file is missing but you get the interface back so you can fix it for real.
The next thing I did, and this is where my memory is a little foggy, I think I used the relink feature to link the audio back to the renamed audio file. Relinking to a new (or renamed file) was the key because simply restoring the missing file using the same name caused it to go back into the freezing behavior.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Fuzz Bucket Jam 1/15/16 - "The Third Man"
This is the first jam session where we were able to record an overdub right after an improvised rhythm track and capture both takes on video. I think it's some of our best work and a new way to make our 2-man jam sessions more productive. I also think my video editing is starting to look a little more mature. Pretty sure the audio mix is cleaner than previous jams. I accomplished this by using only single (mono) tracks of each instrument except for the drum overheads and Eric's lead guitar track. Eric likes to record everything in stereo and I finally put my foot down and muted the extra tracks that I think were getting in the way.
Recorded in Greenwich CT on 1/15/16
Eric Maurer - Novax CH8 (bass/guitar), Electric Guitar
Dan Shimmyo - Drums, Tenor Saxophone
Each camera was set to shoot in 1920X1080 resolution at 24FPS and I recently switched them all to the wide setting (down from superview) because I thought it would look better.
Switching from SuperView to Wide meant that our heads might get cut off so i had to use the gopro app on my iphone to connect wirelessly to each camera to double-check the framing except for when Eric switched from one guitar to the other we didn't check the framing but he nailed it.
One of my favorite things is the multi-cam editing tool in FCPX which syncs all of the tracks based on their audio and gives me basically realtime switching between cameras by clicking the mouse on the view that I want during playback. Then I go back and adjust the cuts to tighten up the timing. I have it set to switch the video track without changing the audio which I like to play uninterrupted.
I also love that with FCPX I can nest clips within clips within clips. All of the split-screen views are "compound clips" containing multiple copies of the original "multicam clip" where each multicam copy is set to one of the split-screen views then scaled and translated to create the split-screen effect. Since the multicam clips are all the same length you can just snap them together and they will be in sync.
Then I have another copy of the multicam clip and add all of the splitscreen compound clips into the new "uber" multicam clip.
Then I do all of the multicam camera switching and cross fades in another "compound clip".
And finally, I bring that compound clip into a "project" where I trim down the video, add some freeze frames, titles, and sometimes credits.
One note about color grading. I ended up adding all of the color grading inside of the second multicam clip. Inside of that clip I selected each video track and applied color settings. The problem with doing it this way was that the split screen clips were color-graded as a single view which was not ideal, and the black line separating the views also got color-graded which was not what I wanted. In the future I might create a compound clip for each unique view and do the color grading there. Then I might take each of those clips and create split-screens from them. And finally, bring all of those new clips into a new multicam clip. This way you can adjust the color on each individual view and the changes will cascade through all of the multicams and splitscreens.
The Video:
Improv Jam with overdubsRecorded in Greenwich CT on 1/15/16
Eric Maurer - Novax CH8 (bass/guitar), Electric Guitar
Dan Shimmyo - Drums, Tenor Saxophone
Nuts and bolts:
Video capture:
This video was shot on 4 GoPro HD Hero 3+ Black Edition cameras (and sometimes you'll get a glimpse of grainy footage from the original gopro hd hero, but probably not...)Each camera was set to shoot in 1920X1080 resolution at 24FPS and I recently switched them all to the wide setting (down from superview) because I thought it would look better.
Switching from SuperView to Wide meant that our heads might get cut off so i had to use the gopro app on my iphone to connect wirelessly to each camera to double-check the framing except for when Eric switched from one guitar to the other we didn't check the framing but he nailed it.
Editing - my current workflow:
For editing I'm using Final Cut Pro X on an 11 inch MacBook Air. The reason I'm editing on such a small computer is because I can do it almost anywhere. The theory was that I would get more work done, and it's working so far.One of my favorite things is the multi-cam editing tool in FCPX which syncs all of the tracks based on their audio and gives me basically realtime switching between cameras by clicking the mouse on the view that I want during playback. Then I go back and adjust the cuts to tighten up the timing. I have it set to switch the video track without changing the audio which I like to play uninterrupted.
I also love that with FCPX I can nest clips within clips within clips. All of the split-screen views are "compound clips" containing multiple copies of the original "multicam clip" where each multicam copy is set to one of the split-screen views then scaled and translated to create the split-screen effect. Since the multicam clips are all the same length you can just snap them together and they will be in sync.
Then I have another copy of the multicam clip and add all of the splitscreen compound clips into the new "uber" multicam clip.
Then I do all of the multicam camera switching and cross fades in another "compound clip".
And finally, I bring that compound clip into a "project" where I trim down the video, add some freeze frames, titles, and sometimes credits.
One note about color grading. I ended up adding all of the color grading inside of the second multicam clip. Inside of that clip I selected each video track and applied color settings. The problem with doing it this way was that the split screen clips were color-graded as a single view which was not ideal, and the black line separating the views also got color-graded which was not what I wanted. In the future I might create a compound clip for each unique view and do the color grading there. Then I might take each of those clips and create split-screens from them. And finally, bring all of those new clips into a new multicam clip. This way you can adjust the color on each individual view and the changes will cascade through all of the multicams and splitscreens.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
New Year's Day Jam 2016!
Happy New Year!
Jamie was in town for the holidays so we got the trio back together for one jam session. This track, Platypus, started with me on the drums and then came to life when Jamie started thumping a cool bass line. Eric's guitar completes the vibe. He wasn't happy with his sound so he spends part of the jam fiddling with his knobs but I like it. And then I flubbed the ending...
Gear:
Eric: guitar, rack of filters and lots of knobs
Jamie: Novax CH8
Dan: Drums
Video specs:
This time I set the gopro cameras to the "wide" setting instead of "superview" which is what I used on previous jams. I think I prefer the way this looks except we should have framed the cameras a little better. Also, the drum cam died before the end of the jam but the position of Jamie's camera captured the drumming anyway so it worked out.
Jamie was in town for the holidays so we got the trio back together for one jam session. This track, Platypus, started with me on the drums and then came to life when Jamie started thumping a cool bass line. Eric's guitar completes the vibe. He wasn't happy with his sound so he spends part of the jam fiddling with his knobs but I like it. And then I flubbed the ending...
Gear:
Eric: guitar, rack of filters and lots of knobs
Jamie: Novax CH8
Dan: Drums
Video specs:
This time I set the gopro cameras to the "wide" setting instead of "superview" which is what I used on previous jams. I think I prefer the way this looks except we should have framed the cameras a little better. Also, the drum cam died before the end of the jam but the position of Jamie's camera captured the drumming anyway so it worked out.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
"Dasarap" video from 11/9/2015 jam session
Started shooting more videos of our jam sessions. What a great way to get motivated to share my music. Something about seeing it performed makes it so much more interesting, don't you think? Anyway, this is a jam where Eric and I played as a duo. This was our first jam of the night. It is a great example of what we strive to create. It's creative, melodic, it flows, has harmony. Anyway, we enjoyed making it.
I'm now playing with a new KB neck from KB Saxophone Services. It has really opened up my sound. As always, I'm playing a TM Custom and Eric is playing a Novax CH8.
I'm now playing with a new KB neck from KB Saxophone Services. It has really opened up my sound. As always, I'm playing a TM Custom and Eric is playing a Novax CH8.
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