Dave Matthews meets HDTV in Central Park: posting a charity concert becomes an exercise in efficient planning to make a November DVD release date - It's Always Something

Post, Nov, 2003 by Ken McGorry

NEW YORK -- One reason RCA Records accepted Coming Home Studios' bid to produce a DVD of the Dave Matthews Band's Central Park concert was the producers' insistence that they could present a finished master of the September 24th show, shot in HD, in about three weeks. They also detailed a "post plan" of haw this would be done. The extremely tight schedule would allow the label to give the concert DVD a solid holiday shelf life at a point when consumer recognition of the concert event was still high. The free concert was held on the park's Great Lawn and attracted close to 100,000 people, AOL sponsored the event with proceeds going to the Fund for Public Schools of New York City

A crucial part of Coming Home's plan relied on the collaborative scheduling of the offline editing talent. Six Avid editors would be asked to online the concert material at once. Turning around a master for a two-hour-plus, two-disc DVD of a 22-camera HDCAM shoot featuring dozens of Dave Matthews favorites with just a few weeks' time from the live stage to delivery became a feat of organizational genius, as well as post production talent and ingenuity. And Coming Home (www.cominghomestudios.com) did not get the green light to put their team together until nine days before the concert.

Coming Home Studios CEO Dan Catullo, producer Jack Gulick and director Larry Jordan are all veterans of the concert video world, Billing themselves as "record company friendly," Coming Home recently produced DVD versions--which they market--of Matchbox 20 and Rush (in Rio de Janeiro) concerts shot in high def. Shortly after the Dave Matthews job they moved on to Las Vegas and a Gloria Estefan HD concert production. Catullo is committed to protecting his company's inventory by shooting everything in HD.

Catullo and Gulick say one of the pivotal figures in producing the Dave Matthews concert video was freelance producer Doug Biro, Biro, who operates his own Brooklyn-based Mad Dog Films, acted as the liaison between the production company, the record label and the band. Gulick says Biro's former experience as an executive with RCA and familiarity with Dave Matthews's music made him invaluable to this project.

NYC's All Mobile Video provided the live production trucks.

THE GAME PLAN

Gulick put together a dream team of six Avid editors whom he had attend the Dave Matthews concert so they could familiarize themselves with the band's performance. Lead editor Christine Mitsogiorgakis, on loan from Earth to Mars, and the rest of the team all got scripts of the concert and a list of which songs each editor would cut for the DVD so they could concentrate on their own material.

Part of the plan was to quickly digitize the output of the show's 22 Sony 900 and 950 HDCAM cameras, including one suspended on a SpiderCam cable (plus director Jordan's line cut, which AOL also streamed live the night of the concert). "We never downconverted," says Biro. About 66 hours of material from the three hour-plus concert went directly into the Avid Unity server at Image Group Post, a division of MTI/Image Group (www.image-group.com), run by Willie Sheehy. One of his responsibilities was to make sure that the Image Group had six Sony HD decks on hand to accommodate the process. By 10 a.m. the morning after the concert, Sheehy says, 40 hours of con cert footage was ready in the Unity and waiting for the editors, who used a combination of Avid Meridiens and Avid Symphony. Gulick had each editor on roughly a two-song-per-day schedule but made it a point not to overwork the team; he encouraged them to put in more-or-less normal hours to stay fresh. It took a total of seven days to offline the concert with all six editors working a little over half that time.

"We were held to our 'post plan' so I kept driving us back toward that plan," says Gulick. After the offline was approved, the project went into Image Group's online bay--a Sony Select room featuring two channels of DME, the Sony 7300 switcher, a Chyran HD Duet and a Teranex Format converten. There, Image Group's senior editor, Eric Singer, conformed the concert program. Fred Salkind of Sony Music Studios contributed HD graphics.

Before being encoded and authored to DLT for the DVD manufacturer, Larry Jordan oversaw 12-hours of tape-to-tape color correction at Image Group by da Vinci 2K colorist Bill Willig. Gulick credits Willig with perserving the concert's rich color.

Audio, captured on concert night in an Effanel Music truck, was mixed for 5. I surround by John Harris with independent producer John Alagia overseeing, Operating on the level of a feature film release, George Marina mastered the tracks at Sterling Sound, and Tom Effinger performed the final layback at Dig It.

The intensely short production schedule for a major consumer release like Dave Matthews in Central Park may not be unusual in the future, especially now that we know it can be done. Sheehy credits the solid professionalism of all involved. "There was no panic in anybody's eyes. By the day of delivery it was, 'Okay--looks great!'" he says, adding that it was critical that Coming Home had Jack Gulick on hand to "make sure the schedule was tidy."