Producing video

I decided to record video for my studio sessions because I really wanted to have a complete view of the performance. However, it's a significant extra hassle. If you're contemplating recording tracks you might want to skip this part altogether. Alternatively you could do the video recording part, a relatively low overhead, and arrange the produce the video at some later time - the hardest part.

I'm using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for editing as it offers the best editing and rendering performance for my 5 to 10 track videos compared to the other editors that I've tried (Vegas - good workflow, miserably slow rendering that doesn't use the GPU; PowerDirector - fast rendering, super laggy editing workflow).

Recording

I record video tracks for every take. It's a fairly simple routine to remember. Then I take the successful take (usually the last one) and move the others in a _TRASH_ folder (literally called that) in case I want to revisit them or change my mind about the right take. I don't delete the video files. In fact more than once I had to dig out something from _TRASH_ because I mistakenly took the wrong video for a track.

In the beginning of the video I usually say the song name and take number. It helps with sorting the videos when transferring them to my PC and matching the videos to the audio track when arranging.

Recording hardware

Nowadays I'm using a Canon EOS RP. See my gear page for more details: Gear.

You can stop here if you don't want to bother with arranging the videos into a final composite video. You can always do that at a later time for select songs.

Arranging

I drag the FLAC audio export first (see Producing audio). Then individual video tracks.

For each video track I need to synchronize the time by usually aligning the audio track from the camera with the first track containing the FLAC export.

I also trim the beginning and end. Fading in and out uses the default transparency fade.

Resizing and positioning the video tracks follows several patterns, depending on the number of instruments.

Rendering

I currently render to full HD (1080p). Given that the individual video tracks are full HD themselves I could technically go up to 4K but I can't yet justify the extra processing time and power.