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Don Giovanni is a Mozart play written around 1780 and is about this guy Don who is a 16th century Spanish “player” whose sins send him up on a three hour singing joyride to Hell. In the middle are some subplots about love and murder.
The show was performed three times with two casts, and two Dons. Robert Parks, music major, and fellow Haslett alum, sang the Don two of those three nights, along with Haslett alum Noble Thomas playing Masetto.
Over the summer, I did work for Melanie Helton (director of the operas, and voice faculty) making DVDs from DV tapes of previous operas. For the fall 2006 opera, I wanted to produce a video for credit as an independent study with the telecommunications department. In the end, the TC department denied access to their [my] equipment when I had 1 credit too many. Figures. Since this happened within the first month of school, the ball was already rolling with the project. So through connections from Jennifer (chief engineer at RecServ), three cameras were secured to record the three nights of opera.
I put the Canon XL-2 at the rear of the theater, because of the better lens and firewire output. The shot was also intended for competition use, so the shot had to follow rules and remain relatively static. With Firewire, I used my laptop and Quicktime so the footage was captured directly to disk saving me the pain of running tapes.
The Canon XL-1 and Sony .. something.. flanked left and right of the stage on the second level to get cross-stage close-ups and such. I operated house-left.
Audio was the usual (3) Crown PCC’s spaced on the floor with high light microphones in the pit, and a spaced-omni rig out in the house. Three tiny AT condensers hung about half way up stage. An MX2424 caught the 16-track recording at 48k/24bit. The choice for high-lights in the pit was one I made instead of a stereo microphone, and in the end might not have been the best idea with audience noise and general stereo imaging, and mixing became more complicated.
3 cameras x 3 hours (3 DV tapes) x 3 nights = a lot of data.
The cameras captured approximately 1.6 terabytes of data, though this whittled down to about 120 gig per show in Quicktime. This was spread over 4 hard drives, including one of my own. Throughout Post, managing storage was an issue.
First, all three feeds were put in line with a master [temp] audio track. Storage became a problem for the continuous 90mins of Act 1 when each camera staggered tape swapping. However Quicktime has a relationship ...thing… where a single Quicktime file can be made up of other files that actually contain the data. So after creating these feeds, I had a nice pretty timeline of three cameras. Final Cut has a mulicamera editing system [pictured] where the feeds are displayed while the live shot is in the main window. Cuts are then made in the time line once playback stops. I used custom keyboard shortcuts for switching between camera feeds. Video editing took the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving - nice and quiet around campus - just over the afternoon. The first pass I replayed the 3-hour opera as if it was live to tape, with a few Diet Coke breaks. The second pass was tweaking the cuts and adding some fades.
Audio took the longest. With storage issues on every drive, Protools did not bounce correctly, and unfortunately took 3 days to figure out. Mike did mixing for the first night, while general levels were set for the other two nights.
After about 3 weeks of almost non-stop computer processing, three DVDs of just a center shot, and one with multicam editing were finished. Smacked on a pretty cover using original graphics, and wala. Not bad for a first attempt, and I hope I get a chance to try it again!
