Real Workflows - Flesh: Meet the Band (Pt 1)

A faux news reporter opens the Flesh intro video.

As a freelance video editor who loves what I do, I often fill my off-time working on personal projects. A few of the personal projects I have worked on have been restorations of older projects.

One such project was a video I did a number of years back for the band Flesh. Flesh was one of the only local bands in Boston during the early 90's that really incorporated video into their live shows. I wrote more about my experience with the band Flesh in the Video and Rock & Roll blog.

The video is titled, "Flesh: Meet the Band" and is a humorous look at how the members of the band spend their time when they weren't performing. It was written by Flesh's guitarist Mark Cherone and myself. The video was used to open shows whenever Flesh played live.

For this restoration project, I wanted to uprez a video that had been produced from VHS source, remove any copyrighted music and clean up some of the edits that were created based on a control track edit system.

The video is split into 5 sections, one section for each member of the band and then a wrap-up section with all four members of the band together. Each section is separated by a person-on-the-street interview. The video for the band member sections was scaled up to full frame 720p, while the interview bits were scaled to pillar-boxed 720p.

As most of the readers of DV Fanatics know, my primary choice of editing system is the Avid Media Composer, but for this project, I chose to use Adobe Premiere Pro. I chose Premiere Pro because I planned to send all of my footage through Adobe After Effects and I love how Adobe Dynamic Link allows me to seamlessly do so. In addition, I use a Sony Media Converter DVMC-DA2 to convert video from a VHS deck to a digital stream and the Avid Media Composer generally errors-out before any material is captured.

As I mentioned, all of the SD video was upscaled to HD 720p. This is why I chose to use Adobe After Effects - it gives me a whole lot more options when scaling my 480i footage up to 720p. Adobe After Effects also made it a lot easier to remove any drop-outs from the VHS tape.

I began the project by laying down a reference track of the original video. After laying down the reference track, I was able to rebuild the the video from its original source. The edit of the original source was done by eye - there was no data such as an EDL available from the original edit. Each clip in the sequence was sent to After Effects for scaling, color correction and enhancing.

Just as I did when Restoring Video With Premiere Pro and YouTube, I used royalty free music available from YouTube for the music bed of each section. As the series continues next week in "Real Workflows - Flesh: Meet the Band (Pt 2)", we'll discuss the decisions made while re-editing the video.

Flesh performing the song "Alone" live on the radio in Boston, MA