Section 3.3. Live Stage Performances | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

3.3. Live Stage Performances

Filming a live stage performance, such as a play, musical, concert, or dance , is extremely challenging. It poses four enormous challenges: capturing the sound, getting power, capturing the picture, and getting permission in the first place.

3.3.1. Getting Permission

At most professional performances, the management doesn't permit camcorders. Whether union rules, copyright rules, house rules, or simple paranoia is at play, the bottom line is that using a camcorder (or any camera) is usually forbidden.

That leaves you two alternatives: Confine your footage to performances where camcorders are OK, such as the choir concert at the elementary schoolor film surreptitiously. (As the size of DV camcorders shrinks year by year, the latter option is becoming ever more popular among people who don't mind flouting the rules.)

3.3.2. Capturing the Sound

When you're filming a performance from the audience, your camcorder gets hopelessly confused . It's programmed to record the closest sounds, which, in this case, are the little coughs, chuckles, and seat-creaks of the audience members around you. The people on stage, meanwhile, come through only faintly, with the hollow echo that comes from recording people who are far away from the microphone. As any camcorder buff who's filmed her kid's school play can tell you, the resulting video is often very unsatisfying.

You have alternatives, but they require some effort. One option is to equip your camcorder with an external microphonea unidirectional -style one. Mount it on a pole that puts the microphone over the audience's heads.

If the show has its own sound systemthat is, if it's miked and amplifiedyou may be able to snake an external microphone up to the speaker system, so that your camcorder is benefiting from the microphones worn by every actor. Better yet, you can sometimes persuade the management to let you hook up your camcorder to the sound system itself. Connect the cable to the audio input of your camcorder, if you have one. (Unfortunately, connecting it to the microphone input may overload your sound circuitry and produce distortion.)

3.3.3. Getting Power

Before worrying about the visual quality of your live-performance footage, worry about the power. Are the batteries charged? Do you have enough battery power to film the entire show? If so, have you thought about when you can swap batteries without missing something good?

If you're filming with permission, you may be able to plug your camcorder into a power outlet, which neatly solves this problem. Unfortunately, because of the extension cord tripping hazard , this solution presents itself fairly rarely. (If you do get permission to lay down extension cords, tape them to the floor using duct tape, like generations of professional film crews before you.)

3.3.4. Capturing the Picture

Now you've got to worry about where you're going to sit or stand. Sometimes you don't have a choiceyou'll just have to sit in your seat and do the best you can. (Keep your LCD screen closed when shooting; keeping it open both distracts the other audience members and gets you in trouble with management.)

Thanks to the powerful zoom feature on today's camcorders, standing at the back of the theater is frequently a more attractive alternative. There you may even be able to use a tripod, much to the benefit of your footage and the relief of your muscles . Doing so means that the camcorder will be able to shoot over the heads of the audience membersanother real advantage over shooting from your seat.

Technically speaking, filming a live performance on a fairly distant , brightly lit stage requires three special considerations:

Use the manual focus trick . Nowhere is this secret (see page 59) more useful than when you're filming a live stage performance. Autofocus generally fails you in these circumstances, because the camera tries to focus on the nearest objectthe head of the lady in row 34. This autofocus syndrome, which arbitrarily blurs the picture as you film, is the number-one destroyer of homemade performance videos .

Use the manual focus to get the picture sharpened up in its fully zoomed-in state before you begin rolling tape. Then you'll be able to zoom in or out during the performance without ever worrying about the focus.

Adjust the exposure. Stage lights and spotlights throw camcorders for a loop. These lights pour very bright light onto the performers' faces, but throw normal light on the rest of the set. The result is a broad spectrum of brightnesstoo broad for a camcorder's sensors. The auto-exposure feature of your camcorder does its best to figure out its mission, but it usually makes a mess of things in medium or wide shots, turning every actor's face into a radioactive white blur with no features at all (see Figure 3-3).

Solving the problem requires you to override the auto-exposure feature. Consult the camcorder's manual for instructions. On Sony camcorders, for example, you press the Exposure button on the left side of the camera and then turn a thumb knob to adjust the exposure. Turn this knob downward to make the picture darker . After a moment, you'll see the features return to the actors' faces.

Be ready to turn that exposure knob the other way on short notice, however. You can expect the stage lights to be full up during the big, full-cast, song-and-dance numbers , but other scenes may be lit dimly for dramatic effect. Such scenes are equally troublesome for camcorders, since turning up the exposure knob can help a lot but may introduce graininess to the picture. There's not much you can do in this situation, because camcorders simply thrive on light.

Tip: Whenever you use your camcorder's manual exposure control, be very careful about trusting your LCD monitor for feedback. On most camcorders, this screen has its own brightness control, which, when set to a very bright or very dim setting, can lead you astray as you set your exposure knob. For best results, gauge the effect of your manual exposure fiddling by looking only through the eyepiece viewfinder.

Figure 3-3. The solution to the bright-face syndrome in shows (left) is to turn down the exposure (right). Unfortunately, when the actors' faces look good, the set may wind up too dark.

Know the show. The best performance videos are made by somebody who's familiar with the performance. Only they know in advance when to use a wide shot, when to use a closeup, and so on.

When you're zoomed out all the way, you can't see any facesa distinct drawback in a dramatic performance. For this reason, you'll be tempted to use the zoom a lot when you're filming a theatrical performance. Unfortunately, actors have a habit of moving during the scenefrom the camcorder operator's standpoint, a distinctly annoying behavior. No sooner have you found your kid and zoomed into his face when he moves, leaving you to film seven seconds of empty set as you try to hunt for a human being. (Professionals learn to keep both eyes open when shooting. One eye is on the eyepiece when framing, and the other eye occasionally looks around to see what else is happening in the scene and to prepare for subjects that might enter the frame.)

If it's possible to attend a dress rehearsal or a previous performance, therefore, your footage will be vastly improved. You'll know in advance when the big, full-stage moments come, and when to zoom in for closeups.

Tip: If the show is really important, consider shooting it twice. At the second performance, position the camera in a different place and shoot different kinds of shots. Later, you can use iMovie to combine the footage from the two performances. By splicing in one camera's shot, then the otherthereby changing camera angles and zoom amounts without missing a beatyou simulate the effect of having two cameras at the same performance.You also have a backup in case you missed a key entrance , joke, or pratfall during the first performance.