Crisp for musicians
Almost all music footage arrives with the same two problems: it was shot in a dark room, and it came from several phones held by people who were not thinking about your edit.
Both are more fixable than they look, within limits worth knowing in advance.
Dark venues are a noise problem, not a brightness problem
The instinct is to brighten the footage. That usually makes it worse, because lifting the exposure lifts the sensor noise with it, and the noise in a dark venue is the dominant fault.
The order that works is to clean the noise first, then lift, then grade. Doing it the other way bakes amplified noise into the picture before anything has a chance to remove it. Stage lighting also tends to produce heavily saturated colour that clips in one channel, most often red, and that part is genuinely unrecoverable rather than a grading challenge.
Several phones, one show
Audience footage is a gift and a nuisance. Different phones, different colour rendering, different frame rates, and often variable frame rate, which is why a multi-angle cut can drift out of sync with the audio partway through even when it started aligned.
Normalise everything to a constant frame rate and the same colour range before you cut. The sync problem largely disappears, and the grade you apply to one angle stops looking wrong on the next.
Use the board mix or a dedicated recorder for the audio and treat the phone audio as a sync reference only. No amount of processing turns a phone microphone in front of a PA into a usable music recording, and this is the single most common way a live video gets abandoned.
Short-form is the actual distribution
The full show video matters less than the thirty-second clips cut from it. That means vertical versions, and it means picking the moments where something visibly happens rather than the moments that sounded best.
Shoot wide enough that a vertical crop still has the performer in it, keep the full-frame master, and generate the cutdowns from it. An auto-montage cut to the music is a reasonable starting point for a highlights reel, and it is a starting point rather than a finished edit.
Old footage from before phones were good
Plenty of bands have a box of tapes from a decade when video was terrible. That material responds well to restoration, because the faults are exactly the recoverable kind: low resolution, analogue noise, and interlacing. Deinterlace first, then denoise, then upscale, and it is worth the render time on the one show that mattered.
Where Crisp is the wrong tool
It does not touch your music. There is no mixing, mastering, pitch correction or stem separation, and it deliberately refuses to pretend it can isolate the music from a mixed soundtrack. It is not a multicam NLE either, so genuine multi-angle synced editing belongs in Resolve or Premiere.
And it cannot make a phone recording of a PA sound like a board mix. That one is worth accepting early, because it decides whether the shoot is worth doing at all.
Music footage, in detail
Can Crisp fix audio recorded on a phone at a gig?
It can level and clean it up, and it cannot make it sound like a proper recording. A phone microphone in front of a PA is clipping and compressing before the file even exists. Use a board feed or a recorder and keep the phone audio for sync.
Can it separate the music from the crowd noise?
No, and it says so rather than trying. Stem separation is a different class of tool. Crisp handles overall level, background noise reduction and wind, not pulling one source out of a mix.
Why does my multi-angle cut drift out of sync?
Almost always variable frame rate on the phone footage. The clip declares one rate and was recorded at a changing one, so video and audio drift apart as it plays. Converting to a constant frame rate before editing fixes it.
Is old tape footage of a show worth restoring?
Usually yes. The faults on old live footage are the recoverable kind, low resolution, analogue noise and interlacing, and the results are often dramatic. Deinterlace before upscaling or the upscaler will sharpen the comb artefacts.
Download Crisp for Mac Free to try, one-time $19 to remove the watermark. Runs entirely on your Mac.