Music filmmaker Dick Carruthers recently turned to his editor of choice, Henry Stein, to help bring Led Zeppelin’s live concert film Celebration Day to life. The pair has worked together on a long list of music projects, including 2003’s Led Zeppelin DVD – the biggest selling music DVD of all time. Stein relied on Lightworks exclusively to edit those explosive live performances.
“With any multi-camera project, you need a solid, stable and fast system, and Lightworks is certainly that,” Stein said. “I particularly enjoy using Lightworks’ sync group function for multi-camera live footage, which in the case of the Led Zeppelin concert was a real mix of files – including Super 8. Lightworks allows you to run these extra files essentially as another camera, something other NLEs struggle with. Above everything else, Lightworks just lets you get on with the job of editing.”
Fans awaiting footage from the tribute concert held for the band’s close friend and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun have had to wait five long years. But, the band tends to tackle projects when they feel the time is right, hence the 27-year wait for a live performance, and the production of this film was no exception.
“The picture edit was originally started and almost finished in 2011 and was subsequently put on hold for a year at the band’s request. The original footage was then archived and put into storage, but when the time came to finish the film a year later, after un-archiving and restarting the edit we found the seven year-old Lightworks Alacrity’s hard drive was dead,” said Stein.
“The beauty of Lightworks was that we just hooked up the new computer with the latest software and everything worked seamlessly straight away. All in all we lost just a couple of hours of editing time as opposed to facing a major headache.”
Celebration Day will be available in multiple formats Nov. 19 from Swan Song/Atlantic Records.
