This article is part of my step by step guide to Recording Your Piano at Home and accompanies my YouTube Video on improving your home recording visuals.
When I first started to create short videos to post on my Facebook Page of myself playing the pieces I’d learned, one thing that was really apparent was that visually, watching someone play piano isn’t vastly engaging for your eyes (it’s mainly for the pleasure of your ears).
Videos rarely have a single camera angle
If you watch any TV program or film carefully, you will see that the camera rarely stays on the same thing for more than a few seconds … they generally film with multiple cameras so they can go from one camera to another as people speak. When not changing camera angle, they use tricks such as changing the focal point from one person or thing to another to keep your eyes engaged. Pay attention next time you’re watching TV – you’ll see what I mean.
Music videos are no different. We have lots of movement and camera angles. Singers and guitarists can run all over the place. Filming in cool locations (on rooftops, on beaches and the like) is also common to keep our eyes engaged.
With a piano, we’re much more limited – we can’t really move around much – it’s our hands that do the dancing. Also, the piano isn’t the most portable of instruments – although admittedly it never stopped the Piano Guys.
However, unless we want to take our Piano up a mountain, we need to think of other ways to add interest and vary the visuals.
Important first steps
Record Audio and Video Separately
One thing that gives us tremendous flexibility in terms not only of the Audio we capture but the way we’re able to capture Video is to actually record the Audio and Video separately. Whilst this might sound difficult, as you’ll see in this article it is actually surprisingly easy.
Equally, having an external microphone gives us far more control. A couple of great options are the Shure MV88 family
Shure MV88 – Lightening Connector for iOS Devices
The very first microphone I bought was the Shure MV88 – fantastic value for money and remarkably easy to use.
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A compact, high-quality stereo microphone designed for mobile recording, offering multiple polar patterns and excellent sound clarity for musicians and content creators.
View on Amazon
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Shure MV88+ – Lightening and USB-C Compatible (iOS and Android)
When Apple moved to USB-C, given the MV88 can’t connect to USB-C, I decided to also get the MV88+. I still use both to this day!
A compact, high-quality stereo microphone designed for mobile recording, offering multiple polar patterns and excellent sound clarity for musicians and content creators.
View on Amazon
How do we manage multiple angles?
For our purposes, we’ll have a main recording – which in the trade is referred to as ‘A Roll’. This will act as our anchor.
Next, we are going to introduce more interest by adding different camera angles, images and cutting from the main view to alternative views – which can even be things like photos, screenshots of the score or other graphics – and back again. This is the what they term as B Roll.
Generally, I’ll film my main view focussing on my hands … here it’s important that your fingers move in time to the music and that you can synchronise the audio and video nicely in iMovie as we saw in the article I linked above. I then film 2 or 3 alternative camera angles separately (by playing along to the main version I’ve recorded).
For the other views, even if our hands are visible, when they’re not in close up then slight timing issues don’t really show so much. You can even film without having your hands on show so it becomes totally unimportant.
Editing is simpler than you think
All we then need to do is combine this footage in iMovie – which is incredibly easy to do.
I already walked you through basic project set up and incorporating our Audio and Video files into a project. Once we have synched everything up and ‘shared’ it (exported it to a file), we can then use it as the basis for our video editing project. Let’s consider this as the A Roll which is now ready. Assuming we have already filmed our alternative angles, then all we need to do now is combine them.
Import your footage
I won’t got into great detail in this post as you can see this in the video – I’ll just give you an overview to whet your appetite. We first create a new project and then import our newly created A Roll into it and also import our B Roll clips. We put the main clip directly into the timeline.
Cut from one view to another
Let’s say we want to cut away from the main image to a different camera angle – such as a view through the piano. First, simply find a part of another clip that we’d like to use by browsing through it to find the part you want (in the trade, they call this scrubbing).
When playing the clip, you type ‘I’ on your keyboard where you want it to start (for in) and ‘O’ on your keyboard where you want it to end (for out) then you’ll see iMovie identifies the part of the clip you want to use.
All we need to do is drag this selection and place it above the main clip. Don’t worry if your ‘in’ and ‘out’ were slightly wrong, you can easily change the selection further later.
Now, when we play back from a point on the main clip, the image will automatically move from the main view (below), to the ‘B Roll’ view (above) and back again. You can even control the abruptness of this transition inside iMovie.
Repeat this wherever you want to include different views or images.
Yet more ideas
When you’ve finished this process, you’ll end up with an iMovie project looking something like this:
This is not the end though. There are lots of other ways to play with your video in iMovie. As an example, another great effect that I like to use is called the Ken Burns effect – a sort of panning effect. Here, within a video clip, you to choose the starting framing of your video or photograph and the ending framing – such that you get an interesting ‘pan’ effect when it plays.
If you look at the screenshot here, when the clip plays, it will start with the outer rectangle and then as it plays will gradually zoom in so that the smaller rectangle will then fill the screen.
In the video, I show you how to do this and more – I recommend you watch it to get a better idea.
Finally, don’t forget that you can add ‘Titles’ absolutely anywhere using standard iMovie Titles. Again, these add some visual interest to keep your viewer engaged.
Want to take this even further?
The creative effects we can get – even in our own lounge – are quite startling and I’ll link some videos here for you. For example, we can transport our piano to a new place using Green Screen. We can completely hide parts of our lounge by using Composite photos.
Of course, there is no need to go this far straight away. I stuck with much simpler editing for a long time before I decided to branch out into these more advanced ideas. People often comment that the videos look nice which considering it’s just me playing piano is nice to hear!
Why don’t you give this a try and see how far you can get … I’m sure you’ll be amazed by just what you can accomplish in what is, after all, free software! I look forward to seeing your movies.
For more ideas on how to Record Your Piano at Home consult my free, step by step guide.
