Stills show three main camera angles - Violet Burning video edit

Here's a brief account and look back at the video shoot of the Violet Burning at Cornerstone. I was running low on memory or power on all three main cameras by the time they were playing. When I import the video I usually refer to the cameras (from an audience point of view) as cameras 1, 2 and 3. Camera 1 is audience left near the front of the stage. The main camera. As you can see below. This was the Sony SR11 camcorder. I had a problem which was either battery but also possibly disk space related. I realized this and did something about it to extend this viewpoint as the camera started to die.

The second camera angle for this three camera shoot was the back middle camera. Here's a sample still from that angle. I zoomed in a bit for the Violet Burning. It gives a better view of the band but we lost the Cornerstone stage posters hanging that are on most of the rear camera angles for most of the bands I shot at the Gallery stage.

Camera 3 is up near the right side of the audience. It's (stage left) audience right.

Camera 1 was running out of space or battery. So I ended up pulling camera 3 off the tripod and walked up to the same position and shot that camera angle with the back camera. I would "lose" camera 2, the establishing shot, but I gained a better closer shot for the video. Had I more batteries and memory I might have not run into this limitation during that video shoot. The cost? A long life battery for these Sony Camcorders is about $100 and a 32 gig SIMM chip was about $100. So for another $200 invested in equipment I might have at least had a longer shot from one camera to cover the concert. (The wonders of hindsight.) The other thing I could have done, but this is just guessing in hindsight, was to save a camera and shoot with that after the others ones stopped working, had I known they would all start to run out of power 40 minutes before the concert was over. But I had blown past my expense budget already for the festival in getting the third camera and more SIM chips and batteries already. I had to put some kind of limit on my expenses. In the good old days, when I had greater income, I might try to power my way past the problem with more money. Actually I'm kind of amazed what I was able to do with the money I spent in such short notice. Having previous shooting experience helped. I spent about $380 on a Sony Camcorder, then on Thursday went out and bought another one. Then also I spent money on a Tascam DR40, that being about $180. I spent a little over $1000, maybe closer to $1200 on equipment. That added with the other stuff I had, the Sony SR11 camcorder, the iphone, Fujix 3d and the Canon EOS brought me up to six cameras. On the way back from Cornerstone I actually stopped at a Best Buy and hooked up my 3d Fujix camera to play back video I shot in 3d at the festival. If you look at the 3d video on a 3d TV, you will wish that you shot the entire event using 3d and had the capability to edit and produce a 3d blue ray disk. The 3d video is amazing. . . it's a completely different level. But unfortunately the 3d video camera, that Fujix shared the same problem that some other cheap cameras at the event had. The LED lighting for the concert created a major problem in the form of a weird lighting artifact streak that appeared with two lights behind the bands. This would not have happened with older types of lighting that take more power and throw off more heat. The LED lights have more features, but they ruin some video, 3d included. I tried to get extra footage with my iphone, but I think it was running out of power or memory so I stopped that recording. One of the nights, I don't know if it was during the Violet Burning or another band, the iphone died being low on power. I was recording at that time and had to wonder if that video would be written when the power died. The iphone tried to recover the video, but lost it. So the Iphone is not a good fail safe device to get video of an event on. It's an extra device that works sometimes, if the battery goes south while you are taping something, you might lose it. One thing I learned (to late) was that the SR11 would use power more efficiently if I closed the LCD side display. When it was fixed on the tripod and I was doing handheld, I could easily shut the side while it continued to film. The newer camcorders from Sony which are rather low end ($500 list) HD camcorders rely only on the side flip screen. There is no separate viewfinder and option to close the LCD screen. So these will burn more power, to power the side display. The main problem I had with the Sony SR11 up front was I was running out of memory and i didn't have spare SIM cards, required by that camera to extend the memory. I was recording to a 60 gig drive that had some other stuff on it. I kept deleting old stuff and backing it up to try to get more space as the Cornerstone event progressed. The best thing I could have done in preparation, would have been to do the following. Backup the entire iphone photo album and erase it, giving me much more free space. Have more batteries and more memory for the camcorders involved. I'm still amazed at how much stuff I was able to tape with a relatively low budget. In the old days one ADAT recorder (that I took to Cornerstone) cost me $4,000. I was taping Cornerstone 2012 with less than $4,000 worth of equipment and that got me up to six camera angles and a nice digital audio recording. That's a lot more bang for the buck than we used to get. Greg