• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

 

Video Remix

Jul 1, 2006 11:00 AM, By Michael Goldman

Madonna tour finds new ways to manipulate and display video content

Pop superstar Madonna is getting a lot of noteriety these days for her current Confessions Tour, but, from an engineering point of view, the real news is the aggressive and challenging nature of the show's video content creation and display approach. At least, that's the view of Jason Harvey, the tour's assistant director and lead video engineer — and he ought to know. Harvey has spearheaded content creation and engineered display solutions for dozens of major live musical tours in recent years, including the current Bon Jovi Have a Nice Day tour, which he says was the first live concert tour to deploy multiple HD cameras from a fly package setup (as opposed to a separate broadcast truck) for image magnification (IMAG).

The Madonna tour, however, relies so heavily on synchronized mixes of live IMAG and high-end, preproduced video content on seven large screens that the sheer volume of material was too great to use HD efficiently on the tour's deadlines, although Harvey says it was seriously considered. Nevertheless, he insists, the tour's method of creating and displaying video content was more sophisticated than any he has ever worked on. Among the job's innovations, he adds, was the liberal use of traditional postproduction tools, such as Adobe Production Studio (running on an HP xw8200 Workstation), not only to produce packaged content, but also to previsualize changes and to add graphics and other changes onsite immediately before or after live performances.

“A typical show might have a few video screens, mainly to show some video playback or IMAG eye candy, with the side screens usually showing the IMAG,” he explains. “It would normally be played out from a hard drive or video tape, either in synch with the music or click tracks, or manually played in for the show. On this show, on the other hand, we are using seven screens, with content feeding those screens broken down into three video streams. So we take seven elements, break them down to three sub-elements, and play them off a computer control system. But, when you analyze it, it's actually six streams of video playing simultaneously, because we have it all backed up.

“This is a big deal because we are pushing the envelope in terms of how much content we are using, and how we are using it. We often try new things, and have to visualize those changes for everyone and then work it out, often onsite in the course of just a few hours. For instance, we are proving that software like Production Studio is user-friendly enough to let us make up stuff onsite, with extremely quick turnaround. It might take a few days to get final approvals sometimes, but the basic changes or additions are often done onsite in a matter of hours. In fact, we're actually able to do color correction onsite, get approvals, sort everything out, and print it to the hard drive in a few hours. And color correction on this kind of material, traditionally, has not been easy because you have to work to match the lights.

“These are sophisticated tools that we can use easily on location, and then show everyone what we've done and make changes quickly. It's a useful change in the way we do these kinds of things.”

Image overview

In this case, the way the video team did things for Madonna's tour was to first order approximately six hours of preproduced video imagery from seven different studios around the world — material that is largely a mix of 3D animation and 35mm material composited together and originally mastered to HD (1920×1080i).

The team then designed a five-camera IMAG setup, and spent, according to Harvey, more than eight weeks refining all the material as it flowed into the production, combining it with live elements and rehearsing the method for displaying it in synch with Madonna and her fellow performers.

“Left and right of the stage are standard projection screens, showing live five-camera IMAG throughout the entire show,” he says. “Then we use all seven screens creatively to cut in with the performers and the music via a series of digital effects. There is one song [“Let it Will Be”] in which Madonna is polarized and colored with light to appear as though she is fitting into the video — essentially a live camera performance on all the screens.

“The preproduced material varies quite a bit. For the opening of the show, there is a shot of Madonna running with a bunch of horses. They didn't have the ability to shoot a bunch of horses in their timeline, so it was actually imagery of one horse, cloned and composited together in various forms. And then, over weeks of rehearsals, and even after the tour began, we kept refining it. The studios creating the content would bring us rough versions on hard drives, and we would create master video templates out of all Alpha Channel mattes in Photoshop CS onsite. That would give us reference shots for them to take back to their edit suites and continue refining until a master emerged.”

During performances, the show uses five Ikegami HL-45 cameras in SDI mode for IMAG capture, feeding to a Grass Valley KayakDD video switcher. Backstage, engineers also use a combination of Grass Valley and AJA signal converters, Pesa Ocelot and Cougar routers, Leitch DPS signal processors, Big VooDoo processors, and Tektronix waveform and vector scopes to amplify, convert, reroute, and monitor the video signal on its way through a series of Doremi hard drives and into the projection system.

Specifically, the playback approach involves the use of eight dual-channel Doremi V1×2 hard drives, controlled by a MediaMaster professional media control system (v. 3.1.98) from Advanced Remote Technologies (ARTI), which Harvey uses to control the entire show — hard drives, video switchers, routers, and so forth. He adds that the entire system is strategically redundant, backed up with additional hard drives and two UPS generators, in the case of power loss.

Harvey designed the system to give him the capability to edit the three video streams — labeled A (two screens), B (three screens), and C (two screens) — using Premiere Pro in SD mode onsite just prior to performances.

“Each screen has templated areas for different images to come and go, and sometimes, we need to edit or composite clips into different template areas as the artist or designers request changes,” says Harvey. “Those three streams are eventually locked together in the hard disk, and then released to play in time for a particular song. If the artist or someone else in the production wants to change some text or a website address, or anything like that, we just re-edit the element right there, when the request is made. One time, for the song “Erotica,” the director brought us a new piece of footage to replace something else, and we assembled it and re-color corrected it to make a video clip we could use in just a matter of hours. We can export that media directly from the Premiere Pro and After Effects timeline [using Adobe Media Encoder on an HP xw8200 Workstation] as MPEG 1920×1080i files or via an AJA HS Xena HD/SD card directly to the hard disk for playback.”

The imagery is projected using Barco SLM R12+ projectors onto Smartvision V9 screen systems (provided by Nocturne Productions using Saco technology), as well as a specially configured mesh screen from Element Labs.

“That screen works like a mesh or veil, where we put video images on it, and you can still see through it, for sort of a 3D effect,” Harvey says. “Several times in the show, we place V9 screens behind mesh screens, including one sequence which we call ‘the music inferno,’ in which we give the impression the images are spinning around the dancers, sort of like a vortex, which is quite cool.”

HD or not?

Harvey emphasizes the original plan was to master all preproduced content for the show in HD and project it in HD. He estimates about 50 percent of the imagery was created as 1920×1080i HD imagery, transferred to his team via FTP sites or hard disk for incorporation into the master templates.

“But there was so much stuff that render times and other time constraints were pushing the production into a corner where we might not have met the deadline with all the studios we were working with,” he says. “So we made a decision to change it all to SD [720×486 widescreen format at a 1:2 pixel rate] in the last few weeks of postproduction. But we have the capability to display the entire thing in HD, and in fact, that is what we did on the Bon Jovi tour, which was the first live touring show to ever use an HD fly package with multiple HD cameras. For that show, HD was the only way to go, because the design was to display a 1:1 pixel ratio on LED screens. We tried the same thing for the Madonna tour, but due to so many re-edits and 3D graphics, and having material come in from seven different studios, the render times simply didn't allow us to get all that footage ready for opening night.

“What both the [Bon Jovi project] and this [Madonna tour] taught me is that HD is still very young and still very expensive to use in the musical touring business, even though we basically know how to do it. The Bon Jovi tour taught me how much extra camera equipment you have to carry with you on tour, and you still need to arrange for SD feeds for output to networks and other things. This tour showed me how time consuming and expensive it can be to create a large volume of prepackaged imagery in HD. It would be nice to tour with a large render farm going with you, but that is not very practical right now, especially since this kind of equipment is so fragile. Therefore, it's hard to say how long it will take before HD video becomes common in the music touring business. It will obviously happen eventually, because the broadcast world is making such inroads right now. But, for now, in our market, I don't know that it's at a point yet where the technology and its expense helps you enough to justify it.”

---

To comment on this article, email the Digital Content Producer editorial staff at dcpfeedback@prismb2b.com.

---

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
© 2012 NewBay Media, LLC.