Virtual Recital

Ian has been attending his piano lessons at Viva Musica again this year, continuing in the RCM level 5 group lessons. Of course, when everything shut down in March things changed. His classes were now over Skype, and the year-end recital was in jeopardy.

We got an email last week from Miss Jessica indicating that the recital was going to go “virtual”.

For Group classes and private lessons’ student [sic], Please consult your Teachers for a piece that you would like to record along with an OPTIONAL couple lines speaking about your experience you would like to share with fellow students and your introduction.
 
We will do the video editing from our end and a private password access page will be available  for your friends and families to watch on our website. We will also be mailing a Recital Year End package to students. Please let us know if you need any update on your address on file or login to MyMusicStaff to edit your information if needed.

The virtual recital won’t be until June 14-21 according to the email, but with the weather being sort of iffy this weekend, it was an opportunity for Ian and I to have some fun.

Here is the finished result. Ian playing “Fantasia in C Major” by Georg Philipp Telemann.

For those who are interested in how we did it:

We started with this YouTube video by Kurt Papke.

It was very informative and showed us two methods to use multiple cameras and an audio track in iMovie. We chose to do the first method:

• Ian’s iPhone 11 recording from the tripod at 4k x 30 fps
• Tammy’s iPhone 11 recording closeup at 1080p x 30 fps
• MIDI signal from the Yamaha Clavinova into GarageBand, Steinway Grand Piano

I bounced the audio from GarageBand as AAC 192 kbps and brought the video, closeup and audio into iMovie. I pretty much followed Kurt’s method #1 exactly, except we weren’t using a professional camera app, we just used the built-in iOS camera app.

We did about five or six total takes, some being absolute disasters (like when I forgot to mute a previous take and it started playing through the piano before Ian started playing). We did a complete editing job as well, when Ian pointed out that his back was to the main video. So we moved the piano to get him more side-on.

Like I say, it was fun. Ian was a bit stressed by the cameras on him, but he warmed up. Glad we did it right after breakfast, because it’s started raining now and we’ve lost the light.

“We will do the video editing.” Pffft. Amateurs.