Live Easter Edit!

Last night we didn’t get much time to think about our Gunther as we had to get ready for a live edit of the Glenville Baptist Church Easter Program “The night before Easter”. We have worked in and with the church before on many projects and think they are a fabulous group of people. We prepared all day for the event, printing DVD’s and stuffing the cases with labels, gathering all needed wiring supplies, etc.
We were blown away with the performance. There was a huge cast (even a live donkey, just for Steph!), and talented cast to say the least, an elaborate set and a wonderful message. Some cast members were actually previous wedding customers! It was great to see old friends again!
So what’s a Live Edit you ask?
We filmed the production with a three-camera HD shoot and fed the signal into a video splitter. Our colleague Alan VanPetten operated the splitter for us and acted as Director. One camera was unmanned for a cutaway shot, but Barry and I ran the other two cameras and we were both in communication with Alan via Clear Comm headsets as he would cue us when our camera was to go live.
He made the cuts and dissolves as they happened, not in post as we do at weddings, and the signal was burnt live to a DVD as it happened! After the performance, we were able to make duplications of the program rather quickly with our tower duplicator for the audience to purchase afterwards for a donation to the church. Discs were pre printed that afternoon.
It was quite the production. Set up was tedious, shooting with manual iris, focus, and gain with constantly adjusting stage lighting was a challenge. But we learned a lot and now have the experience to be able to do more work like this in the future. Thanks to Alan at AV Video Productions for his lending a hand and expertise and Nate at Glenville for thinking of us for this project! Glenville rocks!

Pictured above is Alan checking over all the equipment. Below is the cast going over final preparations before the start of the show, Barry setting up the third camera shot with our back up camera (the A-1) and the duplicator churning away!