I called Charles Hayward after lunch on the day of the recent Albany show to ask if anyone would be filming/recording and he laughed, yes, there was a plan to get a multi track recording though no plan for video. It’s been 7 years since I last filmed Albert Newton live (single camera) and on this occasion Gemma Freeman and the Cosmic Something play first, great. So with little time to prepare I opened up the portable filming kit to check out the options.
These tools get infrequent exercise and were collected together with the intention of use as networked cameras along with CCTV and ad-hock media feeds. All get picked up in OBS for live casting via our SPC streaming servers. Instead this time we are going to record as much video as possible from several cameras and cut it all back to the multi-track audio once that is mastered.
To start the Zoom H4 wouldn’t accept the SD card so recovered the H1n from our Laurel and recorded on-stage sound with that instead. All the smartphones were working OK though despite checking out everything before leaving, one of them still failed to write video to micro SD so we lost a great sequence, grrrr! It wasn’t until halfway through ‘Cosmics’ set that this all became apparent, by which stage could have picked out another old phone but in the dark and with show underway brain was more muddled than it should have been!
The 2 HD sports cameras have very wide angle lens so they had to be on the stage with the performers which is just about when it became clear that filming a performance in the round is very different. The musicians trios in both acts faced each other on the rectangular stage, so it was tricky to find a camera positions to keep more than two performers at a time in view.
The Smartphone cameras are more adaptable so they got mounted on some short mic stands kindly provided by Albany crew. Still it was hard to find the views to capture the scenes well. With one smartphone failure it’s the wide angle material most often used but in lower light levels the gain get pushed harder. The biggest shock later was that latest addition MotoG8+ which got used but wasn’t prepared and ships with some awful AI image magic running. It attempts to smooth out the signal and steady the image in frame so looks very different.. ho hum that’s all turned off now!
Once home, was excited to review the clips and drop them to a timeline for composition. Since the show it’s been a rather slow process of pecking away at the tasks of locking the clips into sync with the audio recordings and dropping the camera audio as they tend be overloaded anyway.
So far there are just a couple of rough edits done but as I get back into the swing of the edit software it’s working better. All in all it was a bit too much to handle alone nevertheless a most enjoyable process, I hope others are satisfied with the results so far!
Just to make things a bit more complicated I first used an old i5 iMac to edit one of the performances, running Catalina OSX (so no 32bit final Cut or Premiere) with latest DaVinci Resolve as it’s the only free 64bit editor. For the other used a refurbished mini HP PC running Linux Mint 20 and KdenLive.
The PC just didn’t have enough GPU to run DaVinci anyway and really struggled at first to playback the Kdenlive timeline. I soon discovered that was it because automatically transcoding of the clips that didn’t fit with the edit profile. Similar issues effected the work flow on the iMac but it seemed that in both cases the more work got done layering and previewing the clips, the better they performed. In the end I moved both to the PC where colours have been easier to balance with some filters.
A rough mix of the multi-track recording of Albert Newton made by tech team Albany arrived from Harmergeddon mystro Nathan and once Cosmics return from current tour we hope to add theirs to complete the edits.
Please now see below for completed versions of both.
Rebel Music: The Albany, London SE8 07/05/22
An evening of genre fluid music curated by local musician and sound activist Charles Hayward.
Music is social space, a helter-skelter ride for the ears. Our line-up this time includes the radical fire groove of Albert Newton, the outsider alt psych power trio Jemma Freeman and The Cosmic Something.
International players Pat Thomas (keyboards), John Edwards (double bass) and Charles Hayward (drums) are Albert Newton. Immediate, compelling and enticing, this vibrant music continues and develops across a wide range of audiences and spaces including palatial cultural cathedrals, social dance events and scruffy South London pubs, a conscious strategy to break divisions put in place by an avant-garde elite eager to maintain a cultural schism that confirms an avant-garde elite. Initially a quartet, since the death of jazz trumpet legend Harry Beckett in 2010 the group remain a trio, working its way slowly back from a ‘music of absence’ towards a place of resistance and communal joy live in the moment: fire, groove, conviction and strength.
