Live Video In The Laptop Age

For the purpose of this article, we’ll assume that the drummer is playing to a click, and that you’re already playing with some sort of pre-recorded musical backing tracks. We’ll also assume that your drummer will play the correct song in case your singer isn’t actually singing.

Computer

Of course the first decision you’ll need to make is which platform to use. I’m a Mac user, so I went with an iBook G4/800. Though 800MHz is considered slow, we’ve had no performance issues.

You’ll definitely need an external hard drive, as the internal hard drives in most laptops aren’t fast enough to play audio and video. The best choice would be any standard 7,200 RPM FireWire drive with a 8MB buffer. This will guarantee ample throughput.

Audio System

If your backing tracks are stereo with click on one channel and pre-mixed tracks on the other, you can use a two-channel USB audio system. The most popular ones include those from M-Audio, Edirol, and Terratec. If you play at venues where the house mixers have a lot of channels, you can separate your backing tracks out and use a multi-channel audio interface. This affords the soundman more individual control of backing track elements such as loops, bass, vocals, etc. I chose an Apple/Emagic EMI2|6 audio interface, as it was one of the few multi-output units on the market that was USB compatible. The idea was to try to keep the audio playback on the USB bus and the hard drive connection and video playback on the FireWire bus. The FireWire bus may have enough throughput to handle audio and video playback as well as the hard drive connection, but I thought it better not to push my luck.

Video System

You’ll need a FireWire video output device. This is the video equivalent of the audio systems described above. I chose the Canopus ADVC 100 as it got great reviews and was affordable. It’s a compact little box that has composite RCA video and audio I/O, as well as a FireWire connection. It allows you to record and play back DV video through its RCA jacks. Canopus also makes larger, more deluxe versions that have component video outs, but that’s kind of overkill for this situation.

Software

If you explore the nooks and crannies (and preferences), you’ll find that most high-end sequencers support FireWire video. These include Logic, Nuendo, Cubase, Pro Tools, etc. But the “secret sauce” in my live video recipe is actually none of the above: It’s Apple’s Final Cut video editing software. Why use Final Cut? A little history is in order here.

Though I’m normally a Logic user, I found that Logic’s video implementation was pretty buggy, especially when you try to open 15 songs with Quicktime videos. Since crashes in front of thousands of people are inexcusable, I began looking for other alternatives.

Since I was already using Final Cut, it became clear that it might be a very elegant solution. Final Cut was designed from the get-go to deal with very large files easily and was very stable. And since version 4.0, Final Cut has had the ability to play back up to 24 tracks of audio, and assign the outputs individually to a multi-output audio interface.

My favorite part is that you can simply make one file, or “project” in Final Cut parlance, for the entire set. You then create a “sequence” for each song in the set, each with its own tab, with the name of the song right on the tab. I went ahead a made “enter” a hot key which automatically starts the selected sequence playing at the beginning of the song. My drummer just clicks on the tab with song title, hits “enter” and off we go. We also built about two seconds of silence into each song intro to give the drummer a chance to grab his sticks and get ready to play.

You may be able to use other software, but Final Cut makes things so painless that I strongly encourage you to consider it even if you already have a sequencer that will support video.

Video Display

How is everyone gonna see your super-cool video? There are two approaches. If you have lots of money, you can buy your own projector, hang it off the lighting rig, and project it on a screen behind the drummer. But the reality is that you will need a really powerful projector (i.e., really expensive), because the stage lights will be so bright. Most of the units you can buy through computer outlets won’t stand a chance unless things are really dark on stage I recently saw the Faint, who have made an entire show out of this idea.

The rest of us, we can make use of house video — the video system the venue already has in place. You’ll find that more and more venues, even small clubs, are installing video systems. These are frequently used in conjunction with in-house cameras to show the band on screens located above or next to the stage, or even throughout the venue. Usually the lighting or video person will be amenble to hooking you in, and will often be willing to switch between your laptop video feed and the live cameras if you give them a set list showing the cues.

Of course you’ll need some way to hook into the venue’s video system. If you’re lucky, they can run a video input directly from the drum riser, or wherever the laptop is located. But often the video input is located at the front of house position. A great way around this is to make or buy two adapter cables with RCA plugs on one end and XLRs on the other (one XLR male, the other XLR female). Use one cable out of the laptop video output into an open channel on the audio snake, and the other cable at front of house to adapt it back to RCA into the house video input. We’ve done this at some pretty large places, and I’m here to tell you, it really works. Make sure the phantom power is off on the channel you use for this; video stuff isn’t usually designed to safely deal with unwanted phantom power the way some audio gear is.

More really important facts

Initially I was really concerned about FireWire throughput issues, especially since I was running six tracks of 16 bit/44.1 kHz audio and the video from the same hard drive. So I used MPEG-4 compression set on “a lot,” and even tried using 15-frame-per-second video, believing I was helping the situation. But the truth is, the more you compress, the more work your computer’s CPU has to do to decompress. This is far more likely to cause trouble than overloading the FireWire bus, which even at 400 bps, probably has more capacity than you think.

After a lot of experimentation, I found the best format for video was simply to use standard DV video, just the like the video that comes straight out of any consumer DV camcorder. Though it’s pretty huge in size (about 200MB a minute for 720x480 pixel resolution), I’ve had no FireWire throughput problems ever, and it’s way easier on your CPU. At 200MB a minute, figure about 1GB per song with audio. This really isn’t too bad in today’s world of 120GB hard drives. And by using DV video, the picture quality is great.

I saved this one for last, but it’s really important. Almost all live music venues keep the power for audio and lights (and video) totally separated, otherwise the lighting dimmers cause terrible hum problems in the house sound system. By using the same computer for audio and video output, you are very likely to mix the ground portion of the power together, thereby causing very loud hum to occur in your computer’s audio outputs. I had a couple of really bleak shows until a very wise old soundman turned me on to a miraculous device called an Ebtech Hum Eliminator. These are essentially really good DI boxes designed specifically to squelch hum. They utilize a totally passive circuit and high quality isolation transformers, and are lifesavers — they fixed our hum problems instantly. They come in 2-channel and 8-channel varieties and are relatively inexpensive.

You now know everything about kickbutt live video — go forth and make killer multimedia shows!