Music Videos: still a part of our biz or?

[Philip Perkins]

For some reason I started recalling the many music videos I worked on, mostly as a playback operator, during the '80s and '90s and recalled how it was that regular production sound mixers used to do those jobs, which paid pretty well at first and then both pay and conditions went downhill as the form "matured".  Do people who frequent this forum do much playback-only work anymore?  From what I've seen, many music videos have playback done by a PA off someone's phone etc, the main reason they had us back in the day was the need for an on-set cross-resolve (29.97 pulled up to 30 fps) off a TC Nagra with a TC display slate, as well as having a portable PA system.   But lots of videos still get made, and they need the same sort of "customer service" re: attention to cueing, speaker placement. levels etc., so I wondered what the current drill was for all that.  I'm not talking about playback as part of a dramatic etc production a la "Glee" or etc--just a normal playback-only job for a pop song video.

 

[JonG]

I see a lot of low budget music videos just playing the song from a phone into a PA system or even a stereo. They just roll endless amounts of footage over and over, syncing with plural-eyes, or free-style editing. 

I even worked on a Billy Ray Cyrus video on the BTS crew that literally just played the song on a loop from a car stereo (we were shooting in the desert, but still!) onto 5D cameras. 

That said, I do playback here and there using Pro-Tools and a smart slate for a good rate. Never turn those gigs down. I've been lucky on those jobs because the pay has been good and the days have been limited to 12h days. But I have heard stories of 72h runs. 

[Philip Perkins]

The Pro-Toolsy type playback jobs are interesting, like with sync varispeed or editing on site etc..  I was more curious about the more run of the mill song videos, which as you say seem to be done ultra low tech anymore.  Even back when I worked on some very high budget videos (MD Hammer's stuff for instance) I never really understood why they bothered much with sync playback, since they edited the footage into shots of only a few frames each...

[Marc Wielage]

Philip, one reason they want everything in sync on set is because the editor will initially watch everything with sound in order to decide what bit to grab. It's true that often, the shot they grab had nothing to do with the music in the song, but they try to at least start with the material in some kind of organized chaos before diving into the edit. And you never know: they may use one line or one word from that song that actually needs to be in sync. If the whole take is in sync, they'll know which specific word that was and where it occurred in the song.

I also think it shuts the crew up when the camera rolls and allows the artist to concentrate on the moment in the song. If it was all just MOS, it'd be more chaotic than it already is. 

[afewmoreyears]

 

Times have indeed changed...

  Back in the day we used to do literally hundreds of bigger music videos....many times our company did 10 a week or more...  for years, and since we used so much gear, the gigs paid pretty well at the time.. The reason they had us, and a few other guys at the time doing the job was because we were the only ones that had a warehouse filled with top quality playback systems...   When we did the huge Guns and Roses shoots, Madonna, Cult, Sting, Bon Jovi, Janet Jackson, Springsteen..,   they needed and wanted really large playback packages...  I mean, two walls of double 18" cabinets, double mid high cabinets, drum monitors, side fills etc...  Nice racks, (not those kind)....  loaded with nice gear..  and we had as I said a warehouse to pull from..

 

  These days it's a phone as was mentioned, and a bluetooth speaker...   Funny, many shoots are now actually union...  and the PA thing is a big no..no...

If the band is lucky, they may get someone with a few QSC K-12s...

  Way back when,  none of this would of flown for one second...  It had to be big, and clear and obnoxiously loud... these days it's budget and function...

 

I no longer do these shoots...  I don't know who does....  but I have seen some funky things...  

I was on a shoot shooting another shoot, when I looked over at the playback rig... a phone, a bluetooth speaker and a young gal in over her head...  all of a sudden the bluetooth lost connection with the very small overdriven distorted speaker...over and over...   I watched the meltdown for a bit and decided to try to jump in and try to help out... I walked over to the gal, she was in full panic mode... handed her a cable to simply plug into the speaker...  all was again well....  she never even knew it was an option...  shoot went on..

This is kind of how it is.... either like this, or, a full on Pro tools deal with manufactured tracks, changes to those tracks, speed changes etc....

   If I am on a show,  (Commercial or NON Music Video) and they want playback too... I always call in a Pro tools guy...  A) they can handle anything that gets thrown at them...and  B-  Someone else is doing the job as is required by IA 695 ....  They always want the mixer who is much of the time recording, to also do the playback... Don't fall for that...ever... that's my advice...  That's someone else's job...

 

A different world indeed....  It was fun back then, I have some really good stories....  and some great memories... it was actually very exciting and enjoyable at times....  I do not miss it though...

 

Photo is my old Nagra IV-S TC Case... It was filled with old slate labels... top bottom and sides...

[traut]

Last one I did was for the Eels twenty years ago, directed by Gary Weis, one of the coolest guys on the planet.

[Philip Perkins]

You are right about the monster playback rig thing, and as that all escalated around here the pay started to go down and the prod co.s became more dishonest.  My first "back it down" decision was to NOT buy a really huge system and rent them (and have the prod co pay for the delivery and pickup).  Several directors insisted on giant systems to be used outdoors all night in various SF or Oakland neighborhoods--they ended up with their huge expensive systems playing at about boom-box levels after the police told the PM they would be taking him to jail if we did another playback @ full level.  But it was fun driving a rig that powerful, for sure, although you really needed to be careful about what else was going on when you went live--esp re grip and electric etc..  Until I repainted it, the inside of my shop door looked like AFMY's Nagra case--all those slate tapes on top of each other.  Marc I know the editors were cherry picking the CU sync lines for sure, which might have been minutes down into the song, I was just remarking on how choppy the editing styles were in the late '80s early '90s, so that all those laborious crane+dolly moves were atomized.  The big fun for me was figuring out how to do off speed sync--both faster and slower than normal as well as TC-driven motion control, long before computers and digital audio were avail for location work. 

[ProSound]

I was hired a few years ago to record some dialogue on a music video at the beginning and the end of it. They were using a Iphone and a dock for playback.