Listen to our conversation with Jeff Moseley
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Jeff Moseley has always been in entertainment. Starting off as a self-proclaimed “rock’n’ roller” in the 70’s, he began video production from a simple request, and it went on to be a life’s work.
It started when he met popular country artist, Marty Robinson and noticed a rising phenomenon called MTV.
Robinson brought Moseley on to the recording studio scene, having him work odd jobs at his recording studio in Nashville. At the time, Robinson also had television shows in production. Robinson spread Moseley’s duties from the recording to the TV studio. As he learned more and more, he got to talking with Robinson about something that intersected two of his loves, music and video: MTV.
Robinson mused why there weren’t any music videos in the country genre. That launched Moseley’s new task: bring country music acts into the recording studio along with local TV crews to capture the performance. The result was the industry’s earliest country music videos. Eventually the crews became internal, the product was refined, and the series gained the name Music Row Profiles. Since, the show has gone on to be the longest running country music show on the market today, and has won Billboard’s ‘Best Country Video Show’ two times in a row.
Along with this success, Moseley has founded two companies, CJM Productions (specializing in corporate promotional and training videos) and The Program Factory (specializing in shows, series and specials having a faith-based or positive message musical theme).
Moseley was wrapping up a documentary and a 13 week series covering the life of Albert E. Brumley, and was invited to capture the 40th Annual Brumley Gospel Sing in Lebanon, Missouri this past summer. The show consisted of over 30 musical performances over 4 days.
Having been to the event before, Moseley was amazed to see how, “the love of this music was such a part” of the audience. He wanted to come as close to the live experience in the capture as possible. So they decided to record the it live, worrying if they didn’t, they’d lose “the energy or the vibrancy” of the event.
For the first time in his long career, he decided to record and edit at the same time.
And being the first time, he had concerns about live mixing and wanted a safety net in case problems arose. He designed redundancies in his set-up that would let him polish his final edit if needed, gaining the speed and confidence of mixing live without compromising safety of the shoot.
The first gear he needed was at the heart of the production, a video switcher. He had certain requirements for the piece. “We needed a minimum 5 input HD switcher at a modest cost. Datavideo’s 1000 fit the bill. They then modified their SE-1000 system to create a MS-1000 rack system to fit our needs.”
His five JVC-200 HD cameras were HD component out, so Datavideo added AJA converters to adapt them to the SDI switcher. They also incorporated an Edirol VC-300 converter so they could mix multiple formats of HD and SD signals into and out of the system, making it, “very multi use friendly at the push of a button.”
The five JVC-200s allowed a 1080i output, while for safety, could simultaneously record a 720p capture to tape. On both captures he says the image is, “very, very good”.
Out from the SE-1000, two video outs were recorded. One went to a Data Video DN-300 DV/HDV Hard Drive Recorder, and the other went to a PowerMac G5 running Final Cut Pro.
He described the performance of his set up, “flawless”. But it didn’t start out that way.
Working on a shortened timeline, pre-production was already tight. Having picked out the best mixer for his budget and needs, he bought the SE-1000, only two days before production started on Friday. The Datavideo team rushed the units to him, and for five hours on Thursday, Datavideo was on the phone training his team and ironing out user errors. By six o’clock that evening, they were packing up the gear and hitting the road.
“They gave us the tools to enlighten and teach us very quickly”, teaching his team, “the things we needed to do to get this to work for us.” He credits the strong customer support, intuitive interface of the Datavideo mixer, and a smart team to get production up and running quickly to capture the event successfully.
Doing it for a good cause also helps. The shoot supported an important event in the in the Brumley family tradition and the Christian community. Moseley understands. “Knowing our work is out there…and have people respond to it in a positive way is our reward.”
About Jeff Moseley
Jeff Moseley is the founder and president of CJM Productions and Program Factory LLC. He started CJM Productions in 1983. Over its 26-year history CJM has been fortunate to diversify their business in both the corporate world as well the music industry, producing award-winning content and satisfied customers.
