Web Video Production for Musicians - Pt I

story by Chris Florio

Placing video clips on your website can be a great way to promote your music. Fans will have reason to spend time at your site and perhaps purchase a CD or some merchandise while they are there. Potential fans who are geographically out of the range of even the busiest touring schedule can view your live performances. Club owners and booking agents can see what your performances look like from the comfort of their office.

As with audio production, the tools used to create, edit and place video onto a website have simultaneously become unbelievably affordable and sophisticated in the fifteen years.

Just as a project studio with DAW software, a little outboard gear and a few good mics can produce music that competes with that produced at multimillion dollar facilities, indy projects shot on digital video and edited on software like Avid Xpress and Apple’s Final Cut are making it into theaters and broadcast television and of course onto the web.

With a little time learning the tools and using the same creativity applied to their music, any musician cam learn to produce their own videos and put them onto the web at very little expense. This month we will focus on the digital video production process and next month in part two of this article, we will cover the technologies and methods used to place the video files onto the web.

Before we get into the specifics of the video production process, there are two points worth brining up. The first is a reminder that just because it is possible for a musician to become a video producer does not mean that it is necessary. If learning to shoot, edit and prepare video for the web is exciting to you than it is encouraging to know how accessible the tools are that make this possible. However, if you feel that getting into video production would be a distraction from your songwriting or practicing your instrument than you are probably right, and your career will likely be best served by putting your energy where your inspiration is.

The second point is that just as your record is likely to sound better if it is mixed by a professional engineer with decades of experience rather than by your bass player who bought Pro Tools LE three weeks ago, your bands video is likely to have more of an impact if someone with some knowledge and experience in video production is involved in the process. That being said, there is lots of amazing music and video being produced by self taught independent artists with the creative and financial freedom that the latest generation of tools offers.

The most important part of the process of getting video of your band onto the web is shooting the actual video footage. If there is any budget at all to invest in hiring a professional (or at least an experienced amateur) this is the place to spend it. With well shot, well lit footage of your performances, you will have infinite creative possibilities once the footage is on the computer. However, the most expensive and feature rich video software in the world may not be enough to salvage shaky, nasty, poorly lit video. As with hiring a producer, engineer or anyone else, if you are hiring someone to shoot video for you ask to see some of their work and make sure it is up to the standards you are setting for the rest of your work. Also make sure that the video is shot on a digital video camera as it will make the process of bringing it into the computer much simpler and less costly.

Once the footage is shot than all of the remaining steps can take place on the computer. Getting digital video into the computer is simple if your computer comes with a firewire (also known as IE 1394) port. All Macintosh computers for the last five years or so have come with built-in firewire. Many, but not all newer Windows PCs also come with a firewire card. If you happen to own a recent WIndows machine without a firewire card you can purchase one for around $30-$50. If you are looking to purchase a new computer to produce both music and video it is worth getting the newest fastest machine you can afford. In this writers opinion, the Mac is the stronger platform for audio and especially video.

The really good news for video these days is the software. First, all you need is one software package to capture the video to your computer, edit it, mix and process the sound, add effects, transitions and titles and output the final production in a variety of formats. There are products at a wide range of prices that can do all of this, but the second piece of good news is that on both Mac and Windows there are entry level programs that do all of this for free. Windows Movie Maker 2.1 is basic editing software that allows for the capture and editing of video and audio and comes with basic effects and transitions. It is available for free as part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2. Movie Maker exports in the Windows Media Player format(.wmv) which requires your viewers to have the Windows Media Player on their machines (available free for Mac and Windows). WMV files can be converted to other formats using a variety of third party applications.

Apple’s iMovie Application is part of the excellent iLife Suite that ships free on all new Macintosh computers and includes Garage Band, iTunes, iDVD and iPhoto. These applications are tightly integrated so that for example you can edit a video in iMovie using stills from iPhoto and audio from iTunes or Garageband and burn the results directly to DVD using iDVD. This package alone is worth the price of a new Mac.

iMovie comes with lots of audio and video effects such as the “Ken Burns” effect which makes it simple to animate still images ala the well known documentary maker. There are tools for creating text and titles. and the program works well with Quicktime, MPEG4 and even files from Apple’s isight webcams. If you are interested in making a feature film or HDTV production iMovie supports HD video capture and widescreen 16:9 productions.

Either of these two tools may be enough to do what you need in order to create videos for your website, however if you want to have more control and wider creative possibilities there are a many more powerful (and less free) tools available on both Mac and Windows. The sidebar shows a list of some of the best inexpensive video applications.

Because the metaphors used for video and audio production are very similar, anyone who has used Pro Tools or a similar audio production tool will find many video techniques familiar to them such as editing on a timeline and working with plug-in effects. A few hours of going through the tutorials that come with any of these programs and you should be up and running, and a few days of work should be enough to create your first production.

Once you have edited a video production and played it back to your satisfaction in your video app, you are ready to export it to a file for your website. Since the version of your clip that will go on the website is likely to be highly compressed and less than full screen, it is a good idea to also export a full-screen, high-resolution copy of the file and archive it to CD-ROM, DVD or other backup format.

Next month in part two of this feature, we will go through the various formats and settings for video on the web as well as the process of getting your video clip onto your web site.

Creating video is fun, relatively inexpensive and utilizes many of the skills that most musicians have already acquired. Once you become good at the process you can not only create great videos to promote your own music, but also will have also learned a skill that can be a potential source of income by offering your video services to others.