Hip Hop concert - DVD, a little making of:

How we made a Hip Hop concert-dvd

The hip hop concert-dvd is now available, more than 100 minutes of some great uk hip hop artists and artists from germany are on this dvd. The dvd was made in pal, 16:9 widescreen. The pictures and soundquality is good. Here is a litte "making of" for you, maybe you like the dvd and you will be inspired for your own concert movie.

We filmed with two cams (the Canon xl2 and the Sony Hc1) on 60 minutes dv-tapes and the sound was recorded with an Aiwa DAT-recorder onto ffive tapes (120 minutes tapes). It took about three month to cut more than 20 dv-tapes and synchronize the sound from the DAT with the video-material. To have a little bit more live-atmosphere (audience), we mixed the original tone (o´tone) from the microphone of the Canon Xl2 into the complete soundmix.

The speed of the DAT and the Dv-tapes are a little bit different, so we had to adjust the differences manually (cut and move). We used Adobe Premiere 2.0 and we switched in the mulitcam-mode of the software between the two cam-settings often synchonized with the music and vocals.

(source Adobe.com)

The multicam-mode in Adobe Premiere 2.0 allows you to switch between the different videos with your mouse. Just click on the (running) video and the software records your choosen view. We moved some parts later manually into a position that fits. Each artist / gig became an own sequence. It was very important to have an good overview, so i think it´s the best way to make named sequences for each sub-project. You can put chapter marks in each timeline so you have chapters in your dvd later. It is helpfully to export all sequences as Avi or Mpg-videos to have a good overview of the results (size, sound etc.). Maybe you can use each part later for promotion-stuff (youtube, myspace) or something like that. For some Text effects i bought a plugin from Redgiantsoftware.com, the "Knoll Light Factory". For some smoke animations we used After Effects, also from Adobe.

To have a nice menue for the dvd and the options of chapter select etc. you can use the easy functions of Premiere 2.0, for some more extensive menues we used Adobe Encore 1.5 (i think version 2.0 would have been easier!). Now we loaded our sequences (videofiles) into the software and we made a preview of each group with a thumbnail. For the introduction of the dvd we made different videos and selected the order how the software should play the videos (the menue itself is also a video with background music). A very comfortably function of Adobe Encoreis the way how it handle the dependence of lenght, quality and filesize, so you can choose on what media you want to have your video. We choosed the option of the 8,5 GB Dual-Layer DVD. Very hard to find out that some errors we got depended on the "not NTFS formated harddrive", so we choosed a harddrive with that format. I think the new version of Encore allows you also to make your video as a blue ray disc! think about that option when you make your own dvd!

All videos are on an external 500 gb harddrive and are about 400 gb large. The original videos are in Avi copied via firewire as 1:1 speed. The video-pc is optimized for video editing with a matrox videocard, an Athlon cpu and 3 gb of ram-memory. Very important was it, to save often the different steps. The dvd was made by DjHighfly, Zoul3 (Carsten) and Cynic-k with his music, the jam was financed and along-organized also by DjHighfly.

For questions feel free to write me an email (djhighfly (at) yahoo.de )

Stay online on Britcore.net! - DjHighfly 2007