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Frederic Martin's List: Live concerts production

Short & Spikey on Sticky & Sweet, Jon Silberg

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on 2009-01-14
- Concert audiences for the world's top acts are paying significantly more for tickets than ever before, and they demand a lot of show for their money.
- Naturally, they expect the acts to work hard to entertain, but as a rule the giant stadium and arena performances also provide high-end video on a lot of very large screens to ensure that there's no place in the venue an audience member could look without seeing something cool.
- 22 more annotations...
- - Video Engineer Jason Harvey of Short & Spikey continues to keep some 17 giant video screens filled with exciting images
  - Harvey, who has done the same for tours by Van Halen, Cher, Bon Jovi and Christina Aguilera, among others,
  - "We start off with a 3D animation of a train with graffiti on it showing the words of the song the artist is singing," he explains. "Then there are many different video presentations made by a number of different people, including Christian Lamb, the video director of the show itself. There is also a lot of giant candy and sweets that fly around the screens. We have some wonderful material shot with the [Vision Research] Phantom HD camera at 1,000 frames per second—things like water droplets splashing into one another. It looks amazing. There is a 3D render of Madonna inside a hand-drawn animated world that has a wonderful kind of old-school meets new-school technique."
  - Expectations, says Harvey, are very high for these presentations. He and his team use Adobe CS3 Production Premium to prepare the video.
  - The MBox EXtreme media server from PRG (Production Resources Group) allows Harvey to store all the 1920x1080 30p pieces and have complete random access control of these streams of high-def video on a variety of large LEDs, including V-9 and V-Lite screens from Nocturne Productions and Stealth Displays from Element Labs.
  - now we're all immersed in Blu-ray and HD broadcasts and everyone's got a flat panel at home and we're used to seeing things in more detail. You just can't sell a VHS image on a big screen. High-paying audiences expect a high-quality product."
  - A key element to being able to create and present these shows, Harvey notes, is the flexibility to quickly augment what gets put up on the screens—to edit and re-render—especially during the period that the show takes form.
  - Harvey's team has an Apple Mac Pro and two HP PCs, all of which run Adobe's CS3 suite. These workstations allow him a lot of freedom to prepare the individual video elements and tailor them to the specs of their respective screens. He finds a lot of use during the rehearsal period, when the show actually comes together, for Premiere to edit and After Effects as a compositing tool.
  - Madonna will generally begin rehearsals about five months before the first show.
  - She works with Jamie King, the creative director of the tour, and dancers and designers and the rest of her team.
  - "First," Harvey explains, "they work out the music and dancing and set design. Then, four months out, they start coming up with ideas for video content.
  - Concepts go out to a number of studios, and they suggest ideas and work on the content.
  - Then the real crunch time is about two months out, when that content starts to show up and they can start rehearsing on stage with the video screens and all the props.
  - "The show is huge," he continues, "but they build it component by component.
  - If they want a video screen to track up and down, they get the motors and chains to do that. There is a car onstage for part of the show, and this is when people figure out how to get it on and off and what else is going on while that happens. They also decide exactly how long particular pieces of content need to be, and they make decisions about the material that's started coming in from the production houses."
  - "There was a situation where there were three versions of particular video submitted," Harvey recalls. "The artist liked the beginning of one, the middle of another and the end of the third. The studio that made it was in Los Angeles and we were doing our rehearsals in the UK. If they edited there and then we had to download a 5GB file over the Internet, it would have taken us a whole day. But we had the master files and so we could re-edit on site and play back with the audio directly off the timeline from Premiere.
  - We'd render that into the QuickTime file format we needed for the file server and she could see the re-edited version at that night's rehearsal.
  - That kind of process would keep happening through those last weeks of run-through. Having three edit suites on site meant we could work with three individual projects at the same time and render them out and onto the media server very efficiently."
  - "It might turn out that there isn't enough time to do a set change so we need to fill ten seconds here, or you find you can't break this prop down as quickly in that arena so you need 15 seconds there," he says. "When the audience is there, the show has to always be fluid and interesting. There can be no mistakes."
  - To that end, everything in his playback system is 100 percent redundant. "There is always an A system and a B system, so we can switch over immediately if there's any trouble," Harvey says.
  - While the dance routines and lighting and costume changes and set design must be timed to the second—the smallest change affects an army of performers and technicians and an array of some enormous props—everyone including Harvey must still be prepared for changes. Whether Madonna herself decides to chat with the audience for a moment or a motor fails to pull a giant screen to its mark, everyone needs to be on the ball.
  - "Most of the video playback is controlled manually," Harvey notes. "If something unexpected happens or we have a technical fault, we have to control it to make it look correct. We're putting on a live performance every night."
HBO To Broadcast Star-Packed Inaugural Concert

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on 2009-01-13
Live Nation Launches Ticketing Company

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on 2009-01-13
- Live Nation Ticketing is live. The bulk of the world's largest promoter's 10-year contract with Ticketmaster has expired and the company has now launched its in-house ticketing company.
- Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said in a presentation to investors today that the company has already sold more than 177,000 tickets at 52 of its own venues and expects to sell more than 40% of total tickets at livenation.com in 2009 compared with just 11% last year.
- 3 more annotations...
- - We're uniquely positioned in our amphitheaters because we own them and have access to so many different sources of revenue. That alone, with our own ticketing system, has given us a real flexible ability to meet the needs of this economy."
  - Live Nation, like the rest of the primary industry, seeks greater control of the secondary market and the revenues it generates. "There's that opportunity to capture revenue that's just escaping right now. The fact that there are millions and millions of dollars in revenues the artist isn't seeing and the promoter isn't participating in, when the artist and promoter are the only two invested parties in the show, that just doesn't make any sense," Garner says.
  - Garner touts the ability for fans to choose and view their seat locations at Livenation.com, similar to the airline industry.
Local concert venue ranks 20th for U.S. ticket sales.(Local) | Article from The Virginian Pilot | HighBeam Research

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on 2009-01-13
- The Verizon Wireless Virginia Beach Amphitheater was the 20th most-popular amphitheater in the country last year, according to new rankings by Pollstar, a company that compiles national concert information.
- n 2006, according to Pollstar, the amphitheater sold 252,069 tickets. That placed it just below the amphitheater in Charlotte, N.C., and above the one in Tampa, Fla.
- 4 more annotations...
- - Pollstar ranked the 100 most popular amphitheaters in the United States.
  - The most popular amphitheater in the country, according to Pollstar, was the DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, Mich., about 40 miles from Detroit. It sold 823,000 tickets last year - about three times as many as the Virginia Beach amphitheater.
  - Coincidentally, the 18th, 19th and 20th most-popular amphitheaters in the country, according to Pollstar, are all named for Verizon Wireless. They are in Irvine, Calif.; Charlotte ; and Virginia Beach.
  - Beach officials say the amphitheater grossed $9.48 million in ticket sales last year, with a net of $1.39 million. Since it opened in 1996, the Beach venue has netted $12 million.
Permanent Link to TicketNetwork Receives Deloitte Fast 50 Award for Corporate Growth

TicketNetwork Receives Deloitte Fast 50 Award for Corporate Growth

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on 2009-01-13
TicketNetwork.com

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on 2009-01-13 and saved by 3 people
Live Nation vs. Ticketmaster - Game On!

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on 2009-01-13
- For Live Nation, taking ticketing in-house means gaining control over a coveted revenue stream in a struggling industry; while CD sales continue to plunge, the global concert business grew by 13 percent this year.
- It also gives Live Nation a more direct connection with fans as the company expands from concert promoter to full-service entertainment force, with superstars like Madonna, Jay-Z and Shakira signed to 360-degree deals that involve CD sales, merchandising and concert tickets.
- 1 more annotations...
- - Blockbuster will be the exclusive retail outlet for Live Nation Ticketing, with 500 stores nationwide selling concert tickets.
SHOWBIZ: Madonna tops worldwide tours

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on 2009-01-13
- MADONNA and Celine Dion were the biggest worldwide concert draws in 2008, each selling more than $200 million (S$287.6 million) worth of tickets to their slickly produced shows, trade publication Pollstar said on Tuesday.
- The pop singers also took the top two spots in North America, which accounts for an estimated 40 per cent of the concert business, Pollstar said.
- 9 more annotations...
- - Madonna's 'Sticky & Sweet' world tour, which finished in Brazil last week, tallied $281.6 million from 17 countries.
  - North American fans ponied up $105.3 million.
  - French-Canadian balladeer Dion, launching her first world tour in more than eight years, earned $236.6 million from 24 countries, with North America contributing $94 million.
  - Among the all-time North American tours, Madonna's ranks at No. 8 and Dion's at No. 12. The Rolling Stones hold the record with $162 million from their 2005 trek.
  - Dion, 40, might well be the hardest working woman in show business, having made Pollstar's list of top 10 acts every year since 2003.
  - Rounding out the top five of Pollstar's worldwide list were Bon Jovi ($176.3 million), Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band ($165.8 million), and last year's North American champs the Police ($120.6 million).
  - Ticket sales for the top 100 acts in North America rose 4.3 percent to $2.38 billion. The number of tickets sold fell three percent to 35.59 million, and the average ticket price rose nearly eight percent to a record $66.90.
  - Acts that hit the road earlier in the year escaped the deepening economic abyss in the fall. Top-tier artists are also fairly recession-proof.
  - Bongiovanni said tickets have sold briskly for Britney Spears' comeback tour, which begins next March, and he predicted sales would be strong for as-yet-unannounced treks by U2 and Springsteen.

Affordability may be a Big Issue for Fans of Live Music by George Varga on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent

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on 2009-01-13

The prognosis for 2009 is mixed, but the concert industry may have an unlikely new savior: President-elect Barack Obama.
Steve Redfearn, the vice president of concert giant AEG Live's San Diego division.
13 more annotations...

Accordingly, the past year was a mix of heady highs (about which more in a moment) and dismal lows for the concert industry, in part because national ticket prices rose to an average of $62, an increase of 5.9 percent from 2007.
Sales were so flat last July that Live Nation, the world's largest concert and live-events production company, offered — for one-day only — discounted $10 tickets to more than 40 Southern California concerts, "while supplies last."
How else to explain the fact that, according to Billboard magazine, the international concert business grossed the record sum of almost $4 billion in 2008, a jump of nearly 13 percent from 2007?
Or that advance sales are strong for Britney Spears' upcoming 2009 tour, despite a top price of $544.30 per ticket (which can only be bought in pairs)?
Or that Live Nation in November reported its third-quarter profit had more than tripled to $139.9 million, or that the 58 Live Nation-produced shows on Madonna's 2008 world tour brought in $280 million?
At the same time, the company's stock fell 64 percent over the past 10 months, a drop that forced Live Nation to buy back — at a loss of $19 million — $25 million of its shares from the rock band U2, with which Live Nation signed an exclusive 12-year contract last March.

"Overall, the concert business had a pretty good year in 2008.

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But everybody's nervous about going forward because the bad news regarding the economy hit after tickets were sold for most of 2008's biggest tours," said Gary Bongiovanni, the publisher of Pollstar, the concert industry's leading weekly publication.

"The concert business used to be considered impervious to recessions, back in the 1980s and '70s, when tickets were much more affordable.
In this age of three-figure ticket prices, you can't really say that anymore. When you see people getting laid off by the thousands, those are people who were potential ticket buyers."
Yet, like movies — albeit at a higher cost — concerts seem to have an enduring appeal, in good times and bad.
"Entertainment has traditionally been one area that has fared the best during a recession because it is a 'feel good' experience,"
"That's not to say 2009 won't be a challenging year; there's a definite softness in our business with our hotels and restaurants. But it's absolutely easier to spend money for a concert ticket than a vacation, because it's less expensive.
"Entertainment, whether it's a movie or live music, fulfills a person's desire to escape during a bad economic climate. And the price of feeling good is modest."

Another Record Year For The Concert Industry - Forbes.com

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on 2009-01-13
- 01.04.08,
- Total primary-market concert ticket sales climbed to a record $3.9 billion, up 8% from $3.6 billion in 2006 and representing the ninth consecutive year that combined concert grosses in the U.S. and Canada have hit an all-time high, Pollstar Editor-in-Chief Gary Bongiovanni said Thursday in his annual year-end business analysis of the concert industry.
- 4 more annotations...
- - the only tour in 2007 to exceed $72 million in North American revenue was the series of reunion concerts by the Police, which grossed $133.2 million. Other top grossers of 2007 included Kenny Chesney, Justin Timberlake, Celine Dion, Van Halen, Rod Stewart and Genesis.
  - Moreover, the concert business last year demonstrated "strength from the bottom up" among smaller tours, Bongiovanni said.
  - Another notable feature of the 2007 concert year: ticket price increases took a bit of a breather. The average face-value ticket price for the top 100 North American tours had increased steadily by several dollars every year since 1996.
  - But last year, the average ticket price for the top 100 tours inched up a relatively modest 49 cents to $62.07
Andre Rieu Fans and Friends: Music Industry Decides That All the World's A Stage

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on 2009-01-13
- Music industry decides that all the world's a stage
- As music sales dwindle, there's only one sure-fire way for the world's top musicians to make big bucks – and that's by touring.
- 28 more annotations...
- - Mr Rieu, who plays a 1667 Stradivarius, and his peripatetic orchestra sold tickets worth £19.6m for four performances in Australia of their brand of "soft classical" music, compared to the £27.5m made by the grande dame of pop from three dates of the Latin American leg of her all-conquering Sticky And Sweet tour.
  - the live tour has . suddenly become the cash cow for leading performers that was once represented by a top-selling album
  - Madonna, whose stage show includes a vintage racing car and a Ukrainian gypsy band, topped the list of the highest-earning tour of 2008 with Sticky And Sweet revenues of £193m worldwide. She was followed by Celine Dion on her first live tour for eight years (£162m), Bon Jovi (£121m) and Bruce Springsteen (£114m), according to music trade publication Pollstar.
  - The massive revenues were part of a music touring industry that grew 13 per cent to £2.75bn worldwide last year, according to the American industry magazine Billboard Boxscore.
  - The growth was in stark contrast to CD and digital music sales, which are showing falls of up to 10 per cent in Britain and America over the last year.
  - Data due to be released later this month is expected to reveal that UK music sales have fallen by up to a third in the last five years to £1.33bn due to the corrosive effects of piracy, fans buying single tracks rather than albums via digital download sites such as iTunes, and heavy discounting of top-selling titles by supermarkets and online retailers.
  - The result is that performers, whose share of the profits from album sales can be as little as 10 per cent, are increasingly looking to other methods of generating income.
  - Where once live tours were an arduous publicity exercise undertaken over many months of hotel rooms and sweaty venues to drive record sales, now the tables have turned.
  - U2, who are due to tour this year following the release of a new album, had sales of about £103m from their previous effort, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. The accompanying tour, which ended in 2006 made £268m.
  - As one senior record company executive put it: "The real money now lies in the live stuff.
  - If you have a big property like a Madonna or a Kylie or a Police, you want to put them on the road.
  - The transformation is driven by that fact that while the price of a CD has remained more or less level in real terms, concert ticket prices have gone through the roof.
  - One study by Princeton University found that prices rose by 82 per cent on average between 1996 and 2004 – nearly five times the rate of inflation.
  - Even in the middle of the credit crunch, it seems that fans' thirst for seeing their musical heroes cannot be quenched.
  - In America, the average ticket price rose by 8 per cent to $66.90 (£46) while the most expensive tickets for Madonna's shows retail at £240.
  - Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar, admitted: "We've had a better year than we really should have expected, given the economic environment."
  - David Bowie told The New York Times recently: "Music itself is going to be like running water or electricity. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left."
  - Unsurprisingly, it is estimated that the leading acts now make about 70 per cent of their income from touring.
  - Artists can expect to receive between 70 and 90 per cent of the revenue from ticket sales with promoters left to make their income from associated sales of items from T-shirts to food.
  - This windfall for artists is in no small measure due to the arrival on the concert scene of Live Nation, a company which did not exist four years ago and now acts as the concert promoter and/or recording company for U2, Madonna, the rapper Jay-Z, and singer Shakira.
  - Billing itself as "the future of the music business", Live Nation is the lead proponent of "360 deals" – the term applied to its tactic of offering performers an all-in-one service by taking charge of making records, marketing them, setting up tours and controlling all other aspects of generating cash in their name from merchandising to official websites.
  - Last year, the company paid £120m up front to lure Madonna away from Warner Music for 25 years and reportedly paid Shakira about £70m to part company with Sony BMG.
  - Music industry experts say this tactic of seeking profit from the "added extras" of live concerts and merchandise rather than the improbably outmoded notion of selling recorded songs is achieving dominance to the extent that a band with relatively little chart prominence can out-earn a household name such as Duffy.
  - But in an industry that remains shell-shocked by the internet revolution, the potential for further upheaval is considerable.
  - Live Nation had income of £2.9bn in 2007 from staging 28,000 concerts across 18 countries but made a loss of £8m for the year, largely due to the huge cost of paying its top name performers.
  - The company's shares tumbled by 50 per cent after the Madonna deal was announced.
  - The result is that both promoters and record companies are holding their breath.
  - Top 10 tours of 2008
    
    1. Madonna – £193m
    
    2. Celine Dion – £162m
    
    3. Bon Jovi – £121m
    
    4. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band – £114m
    
    5. The Police – £83m
    
    6. Neil Diamond – £65m
    
    7. Eagles – £61m
    
    8. Andre Rieu – £53m
    
    9. Kenny Chesney – £49.7m
    
    10. Coldplay – £49.5m
    
    Source: Pollstar
Concert industry posts record year despite economy | Article from AP Online | HighBeam Research

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on 2009-01-13
- The concert business grossed just under $4 billion worldwide in 2008, the most ever for a year and up almost 13 percent over last year, according to Billboard magazine.
- "Overall, it's been a pretty good year for touring," said Ray Waddell, who covers the industry for Billboard. "I'd never say it's recession-proof, but it's resilient."
- 5 more annotations...
- - In North America, the average box office gross was up 18 percent and the average attendance up 6.3 percent.
  - Bon Jovi's tour was the year's highest-grossing, based on the trade publication's data from Nov. 14, 2007, to Nov. 11 of this year. It grossed $210.6 million and drew nearly 2.2 million fans.
  - Bruce Springsteen was second ($204.5 million gross) followed by Madonna ($162 million).
  - Last month, concert promoter giant Live Nation reported third-quarter profit more than tripled to $139.9 million.
  - Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of the concert industry publication Pollstar
The Top-Earning Musicians - Forbes.com

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on 2009-01-13
- From June 2006 to June 2007, the geriatric Stones earned an estimated $88 million. The Material-Girl-turned-middle-aged mom pocketed $72 million. And nearly 37 years since he first reached the American Top 10 with "Your Song," Mr. Crocodile Rock pulled down an impressive $53 million.
- But the really serious money comes from touring. And no one can pull in the big bucks like an older, established music act. The Stones had the highest-grossing tour in North America last year, pulling in a cool $139 million. Madonna's 2006 "Confessions" tour was the biggest ever for a female artist, grossing $194 million worldwide.
- 2 more annotations...
- - Helping drive those big grosses are eye-popping ticket prices. Madonna charged an average of $183.76 during her 2006 North American tour, while tickets to the Stones' concerts here averaged $136.63 and seats to Celine Dion's "A New Day..." show at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas averaged $135.33, according to Pollstar.
  - By contrast, younger bands, even those that have enjoyed massive buzz or considerable commercial success, can't come close to commanding such prices. During the first half of this year, Arcade Fire charged an average of $30.74 per concert ticket, while the average ticket to a Snow Patrol show cost $31.27, according to Pollstar.
PR Newswire | Online Press Releases | Highbeam Research – Free Trial

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on 2009-01-13
Ticket Sales for Pop Tours Show Concert Revenue Is Holding Its Own, Despite the Economy - NYTimes.com

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on 2009-01-12
- concert tours from January to June grossed $1.05 billion in North America, the same as the midyear gross in 2007, according to a report this week by Pollstar, a trade magazine.
- Bon Jovi topped the list with a gross of $56.3 million, followed by Bruce Springsteen, with $40.8 million, and Van Halen, with $36.8 million.
- 8 more annotations...
- - AEG Live, the second-largest promoter (after Live Nation).
  - Last fall Madonna signed a multifaceted deal with Live Nation worth a reported $120 million, covering recorded music, tours and merchandise.
  - “The data so far this year suggests that the concert business is as healthy as it’s been,” Mr. Garner said.
  - In addition to rock and pop, country acts placed high on the Pollstar list. Kenny Chesney is No. 4, with $35.3 million; Rascal Flatts No. 8, with $25.4 million; and the bill of Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood grossed $18.5 million to reach No. 11. With the exception of Kanye West (No. 6, with $31.6 million) and the Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige tour (No. 7, $30.7 million)
  - The total number of tickets sold in the first half of 2008 fell by 5.6 percent to 16.9 million, though that was offset by a 5.9 percent increase in prices
  - The average ticket price for Bon Jovi, for example, was $88, and for Jay-Z and Ms. Blige it was $111
  - The concert industry is based on tight margins. Much of the face value of a ticket — up to 90 percent, or even more for the biggest acts — goes to the artists.
  - That forces promoters to rely on ancillary sales, like food, merchandise and parking.
Growth Of Live Entertainment Has Vastly Outpaced Most Forms Of At-Home Entertainment And Has Become The Crux Of The Newly Emerged Music Industry.

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on 2009-01-12
AJA Tours with Madonna

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on 2009-01-07
- Short and Spikey Provides Cross-Platform Tapeless Workflow and Real Time Editing for Video Playback Concert Footage
- n addition to an elaborate set, Madonna’s performance on the “Sticky and Sweet” tour is accompanied
  by dramatic video footage displayed on 17 LED screens. Behind the scenes, Harvey uses AJA’s XENA and KONA video playback and capture cards along with Adobe’s
  complete professional video software as part of the on-site backstage editing system to help bring Madonna’s show to life, simultaneously combining elements of
  pre-created videos with the live event.
- 6 more annotations...
- - arvey developed a cross-platform tapeless workflow for the tour using three workstations: an 8-Core HP 8600 64-bit PC with 10 terabytes of storage running a XENA 2Ke card, a 4-Core HP 8400 PC with 1.6 terabytes of storage running a XENA 2K card, and an 8-Core Mac Pro running the KONA LHe. All three systems are loaded with Adobe Creative Suite 3, which Harvey and Video Director Christian Lamb use to edit and composite all of the video content for the show. Each system outputs 1920 x 1080 at 30fps directly to the video LCD screens, and can also be hooked up to feed each other directly for real time capture and playback.
  - “For the first time, we have a completely tapeless workflow that uses both Mac and PC platforms. AJA’s XENA and KONA cards allow us to move easily between platforms, which is priceless,” Harvey explains. “For us it’s all about speed. I can output from the Mac into the PC and vice versa. Then we can loop that material through and send it to our video screens. Everything happens exactly the way we need it to, and in real time.”
  - Harvey’s job is two-fold: in addition to preparing all of the edited pre-show content, he also streams and controls the live video captured during each night’s show. To make all of this possible, Harvey created pre-loaded templates that provide a way for multiple video sources to play in multiple boxes appearing on a single screen. With both HD and 35mm material from six separate editing houses in hand, Harvey uses AJA’s XENA cards to load it onto his system and position the clips within the template boxes. Then Harvey manipulates the clips using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects, color correcting them for consistency and creating composites of the video streams for each of the screens before rendering them out for play during the show. Final clips are rendered at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 at 30 frames per second to the Photo-JPEG compression at 50 to 100Mbps for use in the Mbox Extreme media server, using a grandMA lighting desk to control the server.
  - Jason Harvey is the founder of Short
    and Spikey, a full-service creative video company based in the UK specializing
    in live music events.
  - For more information, visit
    www.shortandspikey.com.
  - Christian Lamb is the owner of Frank
    The Plumber, a Hollywood, CA-based video production company specializing in live
    music events. For more information, visit www.FrankThePlumber.com.
Digital Arts - Features - Pop projections

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on 2009-01-07
- Jason Harvey has taken pop concert visuals to a new level, working with the likes of Cher, Beck, and Bon Jovi.
- “People don’t just want to see a sound and light show anymore,” he says. “The audience want to see the artist on screens and they want to see a visual backdrop for the stage.
Madonna tour finds new ways to manipulate and display video content | Madonna and Video Display

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on 2009-01-06
- Madonna tour finds new ways to manipulate and display video content
- 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
- 25 more annotations...
- - Harvey has spearheaded content creation and engineered display solutions for dozens of major live musical tours in recent years
  - 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
  - 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.
  - 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).
  - Backstage, Jason Harvey, assistant director and lead video engineer for Madonna’s Confessions Tour, and his team use an HP xw8200 Workstation outfitted with a combination of Grass Valley and AJA signal converters, Pesa Ocelot and Cougar routers, Leitch DPS signal processors, and Tektronix waveform and vector scopes.
  - “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.”
  - 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.”
  - Barco
  - 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.
  - “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.
  - 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.”
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Frederic Martin

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Updated on 2009-01-14
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Frederic Martin's List: Live concerts production

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AJA Tours with Madonna

Digital Arts - Features - Pop projections

Madonna tour finds new ways to manipulate and display video content | Madonna and Video Display

3D Entertainment – 3ality Digital 3D Live Action Video Production

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