Admittedly as a middle-ager I’m still getting my head wrapped around how music is shared and promoted now, certainly it’s no secret that you need to be seen as much as heard, marketing your band without a Social Media and Youtube presence today is becoming increasingly difficult. When we built our new studio in 2014 I realized we would need to be able to handle both Audio recording and Video production, we didn’t have much of a budget left for the Video side of things so I figured if and when we got around to putting something together it would have to be ‘low rent’. After a couple of half-hearted and decidedly ‘meh’ attempts I decided we better give this a try for real and below is what we came up with…

As expected we used AV Linux, with Ardour and Cinelerra as the main software tools, I’ll try not to get too elaborate with the details but I’m sure some folks will want to know about the nuts and bolts. We recorded 8 tracks live to Ardour 5.5 through a Presonus 1818VSL Audio interface while simultaneously recording with 4 Video cameras. The cameras were a dog’s breakfast of 2 aging Zoom Q4HD’s, a Sony HD Camcorder belonging to our bass player Pete (sorry can’t remember the model) and lastly a Samsung Note 4 Smartphone (which actually had the best video quality!?). I used the custom build of Cinelerra-CVA included in AV Linux to edit the video, I know Cinelerra is a very maligned and misunderstood application in the Linux world but I love it, I worked on editing this for many hours juggling a very full arrangement consisting of 4 separate Audio and Video streams from each camera as well as the multitrack export from Ardour and it didn’t crash once. All the Audio and Video streams had to be synced manually and then I added some graphic overlays I made in GIMP. To push my luck I did a screen capture of the Ardour session and then added it as a synced Picture in Picture track just cuz…

Dual-head editing with Cinelerra:

It was a bit of a long night by the time we got the sound and video equipment all set up and then we blew a few takes, by the time we nailed it we were getting tired and grumpy which injected a little extra fire into the final result. 😛

OK, ’nuff said, here’s the video: