Working Musicians - How did you make your promo video?
 

Hey guys...been doing a solo acoustic act for a few months now and really need a decent promo video. I have made a few iphone recordings of some live gigs, but they don't really sound good enough to send out to bar owners when looking for gigs. Any ideas on how I can make my own professional looking/sounding promo video without breaking the bank? I thing the iphone is good enough for video, but not for the audio portion. Ideas?

I was thinking about going to a local club with a nice stage during off hours and recording my songs there, so it would look like I was performing live, but I wouldn't have to deal with the chatter from the crowd mixing in. I am looking to make something with a bunch of quick song clips....maybe 2 mins total for the whole video.

There is honestly no easy way to go about this (which sucks). If you prefer one-takes, then it's gotta be a guitar through an audio interface through line or mic, synced with tripoded video (preferably of multiple angles) in post-production software of that same take.

What a lot of people do nowadays though is to get a really nice audio recording done and then fake playing many times over multiple video takes and stitch together a video. Both methods are tedious and time consuming :cry:

There really is no way to do this that looks great without professionals, including lighting. An iphone has one middle-wide lens that is a limitation and it has audio limitations to. There are literally thousands of lame musical videos on Youtube and the only way to really escape that is to get some professional help, paid or volunteer.

I have actually seen some pretty good iphone shot promo videos out there.

Any of the portable recorders will do a nice job, available for as little as $100. Then sync the audio and video. There are lots of posts here (probably mostly in the recording forum) talking about how to do this. You might also be able to take a line out of your sound system into the phone.

Tascam makes a portable recorder specific for live shoot DSLR Videos. It’ll work with IPhone, although, I’d suggest contacting videographers in your area.

I use a Tascam DR-60DmkII as double system sound recorder with a Panasonic Gh4. But this requires syncing the sound, which can be easy or very difficult depending on how you handle it.

No one in America respects Doug Young as much as I do, but while it is easy to make your own demo video, as he suggests, with help from Youtube, it is not easy to make one which looks good, or does not look so shabby as to make the performer look lame.

This really comes down to where you set the expectation bar for quality, as it does in audio recording (and I notice that Doug is not one for low-balling his audio recording). Most home-made music videos suck by any professional or national standards and like it or not, these standards are now hardwired into people's brains from a life-time of watching television.

Whatever you do and however you do it you are going to judged by the viewer in how your video looks compared to something produced by a national recording company or television producer, unless the viewer is your mother. That's why the big guys spend all that money.

You can make a credible video of your performance for a fairly low cost, but you need to get somebody into the process that understands lighting, editing, lenses and the rest of it IMHO.

Any of the newer smartphones have the ability to capture great audio and video - and I know that the new iPhone is powerful enough to do alot of the editing as well, although the screen is kinda small. If you have a friend who can record you, do it at your next gig, figure out what didn’t work (person videoing shouldn’t be dancing wildly and talking while videoing, for example) then do it again at the next couple gigs. Consider setting the phone up on a mini-tripod at a table near you so it gets good audio signal and a good stable picture. Remember they also want to see that you draw a good crowd, and people enjoy hearing you - so some crowd shots are good to throw in. Once you have the raw footage, then you, or someone else, can put it all together in a couple of different length and size clips. iMovie is pretty easy to use, and since it comes with all Macs, finding someone whose got some familiarity with it isn’t usually very hard. It’s fun, pretty easy, and simple to add to or change as you figure out how to fine tune your presentation -

I may try this approach first and see if it's enough. I Just bought a Shure MV88 mic that works with the iphone. I have a tripod, so I will try and record some songs at my next gig. Sometimes its a challenge to get the camera is a good spot close to the speaker and with a clear shot at me playing. That's why I was thinking of doing it "off hours" when I can control more of the environment.

The two simplest approaches are to use the iPhone to capture some decent video and either a portable recorder like a Zoom H1 or H2n (workable) or H4n (better) or a digital mixer or analog mixer with USB connectivity (even better) to capture the audio. Then you edit, mix, and synch the audio and video on your computer.

With an H4n, just to give you an example, you can feed the vocal mic and guitar pickup (or mic) from your mixer into the two separate mic input channels, while also capturing the room sound with the onboard stereo mic pair. Then you can mix, edit, and otherwise process those tracks using a DAW before you synch it with your video. A digital mixer or analog mixer with at least 4 channel USB connectivity can give you a similar multi-track recording to process and synch with your audio. The tricky thing will be achieving adequate vocal/guitar separation if you're using a mic to amplify your guitar.

In a venue with good acoustics and a reasonably quiet ambience, however, you can get a good recording using something as simple as the stereo mics on an H1 or H2n--or even the separate stereo mic pair that Zoom makes for iPhones. Also: if you want to get fancy, you can set up two or even three iPhones in different locations, capturing the same performance, so you can later edit them together to get a multi-camera effect.

Louis

A totally agree with this, tho the OP seemed to be happy with the video on his iphone, and was concerned about audio quality.

All depends on "how low is low" :-) My You Tube videos are recorded on a Zoom H6 ($399) and lately I've been using an AT4050 stereo mic I got for $800. You could get 95% of the sound with an H4 and internal mics ($200).

There are two questions I should have asked: 1) What does "not breaking the bank" mean? A budget would help because everyone's idea of "cheap" is different. and 2) What gear do you already have?

Another consideration is the video itself. You said "high quality", but does that mean a studio look, an MTV-style (dating myself to when MTV did music videos) big production, or do you want to show a real performance in a club?

Let me throw out a few examples of what I've done (or am in the process of) along with the "bank" size. Maybe this will give you some ideas:

1) So-so quality, almost "free":
I just posted a live performance video of me and Teja Gerken over in show and tell. The incremental cost of that was zero. We recorded video to a Zoom camera that someone gave Teja. The audio was recorded directly in the board - QSC Touchmix, which has builtin recording. We could have just run a line out to the camera if we didn't care about draping a cable across the audience. Lighting is terrible, camera quality mediocre, but sound is ok and it's a reasonable representation of the gig (probably what a a future booker would prefer to see). I edited that in Final Cut (trimming out the one song, adding titles). Final Cut cost $299, but I could have used iMovie (free).


2) Good quality, costs "add up":
My own You Tube videos are shot at home, more of a studio (aka "spare bedroom") look. I use 3 Panasonic cameras ($1000-ish each) and have a pair of Umbrella lights bought from Cowboy Studios ($200?) and a chinese lattern from Ikea ($9?) and a black backdrop ($35). Audio is recorded to the Zoom H6 ($399) and an AT4050ST ($800) mixed in Final Cut ($299) and Logic ($299). So the cost adds up a bit, the audio portion is under $2K, with the mic being the biggest contributor. Here's an example:



3) Very High Quality, Very Low Cost
I've just started working with a local public access TV station, which is very cool because you get access to studios, and all kinds of pricey gear. They have cameras that cost more than most cars... Cost to me is $70 for a 2 hour rental session, plus the effort of putting together a crew from local volunteers (I have to bribe them with food). (I also had a one-time cost of $100 to take a class where they teach you how to use their gear.) They have editing software, great lighting, everything you need for a high quality video. I'm actually about to do a couple of videos for some acts looking to use the videos to get gigs using this setup.

Here's an example that I didn't shoot (I don't have any of mine I can share yet), but done by someone else at the station using the same setup. Just a local band:



Hope this helps - there are ways to do something at almost any price point!

To be honest if I was a club owner I'd be more interested in seeing a lower quality video that shows you playing to a crowd that's appreciative and having a good time than a slick video done under controlled circumstances with no crowd. The latter would mean nothing to me

That said using something like a Zoom recorder would up your game

This makes sense to me if you are just looking to give a bar owner an idea of what you do. I did this video last year by just using some videos a friend took with his iPhone and then using iMovie on my phone. It's certainly not good quality! The sound is not good, but you can hear everything - including the crowd noise.. My thought was to share this with a bar owner who was considering booking me, but the reality is, I've not used it for that. All of my gigs since I made this video have come from referrals and people who've actually seen me play at a gig.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyvANOr6tPc


A buddy of mine likes to dabble in video and has done a few for friends. I really need to get with him and do something nicer! Here's an example of his work with his basement setup. He uses multiple cameras and feeds the audio into Pro Tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_kZMzNEd8

Well, club owners are a motley group to be sure, and who knows where their taste lies? If all you want to do is show a club owner that you can hold it together on stage and entertain a bunch of folks in full bloom on a Friday night, well, an iphone with available light may be fine, unless your competitors have more video experience or are willing to spend some do-re-me on their demos.

But if you want videos that go out into the world via Youtube or Vimeo or whatever, then what your videos look like is what you are to the viewers. If they are lame, you are lame.

Doug makes a lot of very good suggestions and gives specific advice (although clearly nobody told him that as far as backgrounds go, black is death). And Doug has not only made a significant investment in hardware, he has figured out how to use it, where to put the cameras for a sensible 3-camera setup, effective mike setups and so on. So except for the background question (IMHO) he has clearly studied up on the process and is using a professional and very powerful editing program in Final Cut Pro. All of his videos are well produced and effective. But he has worked on it and spent some time and money in the effort. That is a far cry from shooting in a bar with an iphone.

I should make clear that I was in the production business for most of my life, so I am not your ordinary kibitzer on the subject and that might not be fair to the OP's original intent.

I like black :-) it lets you focus on the subject, not the background. I also ignored people who warned me that playing solo instrumental guitar is deadly boring to most :-) However, I've been playing around with using white lately, for that Apple ad look. Someday I'll get that down. I'm shooting a bunch of videos with Steve Baughman right now where we're using my studio, which is both mostly red, and much more cluttered looking, and it's turning out interesting in its own way. In any case, the studio portrait look may not be appropriate for someone trying to pitch a live show - I imagine what most venues would most like to see is lots of people lined up at the cash register.