Bobby Lee & Band – Live video @ McDaids, Midleton, Co. Cork – Album Launch

Last Sunday I went to McDaids, Midleton, Co. Cork to video an album launch for my friend Bobby Lee, a well respected and talented musician from Ireland. His album “The Future History” has 9 tracks and is available for preview, mp3 download or cd at Cd Baby

Here’s one review describing the album:

Mark Mc Clelland – Backstage Traffic

“The Future History ” Bobby’s current album is a collection of beautifully crafted songs that will take your soul, look after it for a few hours and then hand it back with a smile that says, “Yes everything’s going to be alright.” And you know what? You believe it.

Bobby Lee - Live @ McDaids, Midelton

Live @ McDaids, Midleton, Co. Cork, Ireland – 16/12/07 – Photo by: Kieran McCarthy

Of his many achievements this is a very memorable one:

Irish Guitarist of the Future – Fender
In 1996 Bobby Lee was hailed as “Irish Guitarist of the Future” judged by Donal Gallagher brother of the great Rory Gallagher. The prize was a guitar and amp, and a trip to London to Fender’s 50th anniversary celebrations at the Wembley Conference Centre. There he received the award in front of a glittering audience which included, Hank Marvin of The Shadows, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac & Albert Lee amongst others.

The Video

watch videoWatch here >> Bobby Lee & Band- Live video @ McDaids (pop up overlay)

I will be editing the rest of the footage in the new year as a promo dvd for Bobby. What was interesting about the video shoot was it was filmed and captured direct to external hard drive as apposed to dv tape. This was my first time trying this technique and it worked out a treat, it was ready for editing straight away.

Please head over to one of the links below and support Bobby Lee, an artist of well deserved recognition…

Bobby Lee Links

www.bobbyleemusic.com
Bobby Lee – MySpace
Bobby Lee – Electronic Press Kit (EPK)
Bobby Lee – Apple iTunes

Live Video Webcast 7th Dec, The Savoy, Cork – Seeing Red Records

Tonight I am in Cork City at The Savoy for the Seeing Red Records Christmas Launch Party.

I will be responsible for the live video web broadcast which will start at 10pm till 2am. I will be using my Canon XL2 and Windows Media Encoder running on my laptop to encode and broadcast this event live. There will also be live chat enabled so that viewers can chat with each other while watching the live broadcast.

If you get a chance please visit www.seeingredrecords.com tonight after 10pm to watch and support this event.

If your at the event please come up to me and say “Hi”, I’ll be the one with the video camera and geeky stuff.

How to download and save Bebo video files – the easy way.

How To Download And Save Bebo Video Files The Easy Way.

How to download and save Bebo video files - the easy way.

I was asked by my friend Shane Supple if it was possible to download a video that was uploaded to Bebo.com.

It is not as straight forward as you may think, having tinkering around with source code etc. I discovered that when you upload a video to Bebo you are actually storing your file on www.videoegg.com so I took the embed source code that Bebo provide which reveals the first part of this tip.

Go to a  page that displays a bebo video, you will know it is a bebo video because their logo is embedded as a watermark over the video then scroll down till you see the “Embed” part of the page.

Example:

download or save Bebo video files - the easy way

 

Copy the embed code and paste it into Notepad, it will show something like this:

<embed width=”425″ height=”350″ src=”http://static.videoegg.com/videoegg/loader.swf” FlashVars=”bgColor=FFFFFF
&file=http://download.videoegg.com/gid329/cid1124/E7/7N/1175278125C1Zp0f2MW8
zokcDy8sWC
&autoPlay=false
&forcePlay=false&logo=&allowFullscreen=true” quality=”high” allowScriptAccess=”always” bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” scale=”noscale”wmode=”window” name=”VE_Player” align=”middle” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” /><br><a href=”http://bebo.com/watchtv”>Watch More Videos</a> Uploaded by <a href=”http://bebo.com/watchuser/436885205″>www.bebo.com/De-baw</a>

All you are interested here is the part:

http://download.videoegg.com/gid329/cid1124/E7/7N/1175278125C1Zp0f2MW8
zokcDy8sWC

To download and save that file you need to put _high.flv to the end of the URL string in order to download that file in .flv format.

So the new URL would be:
http://download.videoegg.com/gid329/cid1124/E7/7N/1175278125C1Zp0f2MW8
zokcDy8sWC_high.flv

Type or copy/paste this URL into a browser window and you will be prompted to download the .flv file

Try it here: http://download.videoegg.com/gid329/cid1124/E7/7N/1175278125C1Zp0f2MW8
zokcDy8sWC_high.flv

How to play an .flv file

You need to download a FLV Player to play back the .flv file. There are many free flv players available on the internet I use Wimpy FLV Player. No installation needed as its a stand alone player and it also supports drag and drop. It is available for both Mac and Windows.

Download it here: http://www.wimpyplayer.com/products/wimpy_standalone_flv_player.html

There is probably lots of software and tricks to download video from Bebo but I think this is the quickest way around it. Hope this helps you…

Shooting the video “Darling” for Steve Whelan

Canon MV300 Steve Whelan who hails from Youghal in Co. Cork, Ireland released his album “The Last Walk” this year. He is a well know singer/songwriter in the area and as a test project I asked him if he would be interested in making a video. So here is a quick run down of what I done…

1st Shoot Info:

We settled on the song “Darling” so with no script or plan we headed to Youghal Beach to try out a few shots. Steve had his guitar I had my Cannon MV300 a very basic dv camera (pictured above) and with Shane Supple in car. We just played around and had a bit a fun canning about 20 minutes of footage. Most of the shots were filmed from an opened window at passenger seat in Shane’s car while circling around Steve on the beach, by the way we had the song blasting on the car stereo so Steve could lip sync – we got some strange looks from strollers but didn’t care.

2nd Shoot Info:

I gave Steve a shout one night and headed to Claycastle Recording Studio. I filmed him in a room with just a red bulb next to him. This red bulb caused a lot of video “noise” in the shot but it looked alright and the idea was to keep things simple so we did.

3rd Shoot Info:

The girl in the car at the start of the video and is my niece Terri McCarthy. I had my Canon handycam in the car one night and filmed about 1 minute of her driving the car.

4th Shoot Info:

Put Steve in front of a green screen and filmed him syncing to the song. We filmed it twice and took the best bits.

Other footage:

The carousel shot was old footage I had from a shoot for Perk Family Entertianment Centre. It just seemed to work so I left it in.

The footage of the beach I created in After Effects. I took the hi-res beach shot and virtually zoomed in on the photo then I set up the timeline so it recorded from zoomed in to zoomed out then I just reversed the timeline, this gives the effect of a plane flying over a beach… (nice trick!)

So armed with all the footage I edited the video using Adobe Premiere Pro and made the decision to go with black & white because

  • 1. It suited the mood of the song.
  • 2. The footage had mixed levels of exposure from the different shoots so going black & white pulled them together.

Ingredients:

The end result was a success, nothing ground breaking but I learned from the experience that you dont need lots of €€€ to shoot a music video.

    • 1 Canon MV300
    • 1 Guy with Guitar
    • 1 Guy with car
    • 1 Girl in car
    • 1 Green Screen
    • 1 room with red bulb
    • Software
    • Patience
    • Zero Budget

= 1 music video

Result:

The video has so far recieved over 5,511 views on YouTube and good feedback for Steve. Click here to watch it on YouTube

Thanks to Steve Whelan and I hope you enjoy the video…
Darling – Steve Whelan