It was time for the annual, small town Saturday parade called the Lunar New Year Unity Parade. We didn’t cover it in 2007, but this year, our main dawg asked us to cover it. I took the assignment (well, no one else was able to work the weekend!), and I had help from our half-time production assistant after she work an early morning TV studio production at the local ABC affiliate. We prepped two ENG cameras each with a wireless receiver tuned to the transmitter which had the lav mic on the MC. The wireless mic feed was assigned to channel twoand natural (“nat”) sound on channel one.
Camera one was on a riser near the MC, and my camera, camera two, was on the street for the up-close action. Camera one was assigned the wide, cover shot of the action on the street with the operator keeping an extra eye on my position. By doing this, camera one can, when camera two has the action, swings to the next parade entrant.In theory, this works very smoothly, but it didn’t this certain Saturday.In editing, I had to work with four elements;
- Camera one’s video
- Camera two’s video
- Camera two’s NAT sound, and,
- the MC’s narration audio
Ha! One of the organizers told Parks and Recreation staff to setup the mics and speakers to point away from the street. Well, we were going to shoot at the street where the parade really is…not where the parade participants are being staged! Good thing the MC had some experience with the previous parades and gave instructions to the parade staff to release each group after she has stopped talking about the current one. This was key to shooting the groups and time-shifting camera one’s, camera two’s video and the audio to make it appear as if everything the MC is saying is live to what we are both shooting! That was the key. And, if you listen carefully, after the MC finishes with the description of the current group of parade participants, in the background, you’ll hear camera two’s NAT sound and the MC’s voice in the background already describing the next group!
This time-shifting in post-production (editing) has always been an issue shooting this event. It takes more time to produce because we have to edit each camera’s video and the audio. Basically, three objects floating around and lining them up at some starting point.
Our equipment: Sony dsr-500s, sachtler tripods, SHURE UHF wireless mics, Pinnacle Liquid Silver NLE editor