Concert Filmmaking, Color and Exposure questions

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Offbeatbryce

I have been filming for about 10 years. I know lots about lights, color etc. I am experienced in Documentary FilmMaking.
Recently I've found a love for shooting Concerts as my friend is in a band and he asked me to film a few of his bands gigs. I really enjoy it but have a few questions.

Is it best to film in Manual Focus or Auto Focus when I have a second camera setup that I'm not operating?

How do I properly setup the exposure and white balance with the stage lights always changing brightness or color with colored lights?
I've searched quite a few concert videos from professional filmmakers from MTV, Disney etc and some are right on the money and others aren't.

Here is some examples I found where the color or brightness doesn't always match from camera to camera. How important is it that the brightness and color be perfect from each camera?

(please don't judge the music as I'm just looking at camera work here)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XrZvR-UAuY

This clip starts of with a wide shot with bright faces but then the closeup of Joe Jonas has his face all blue. Shouldn't the closeup be the same color as his face is from the wide shot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOXSl9p-oWA


Here you have a wide shot of the drummer and face is more blown out compared to the rest of the cameras. Wouldn't it be better if the wide shot didn't have the face brighter than the rest of the cameras?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Ov0cDPZy8

This one has John Mayer with his skin tone changing slightly lighter to darker depending on the shot
 
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Set your white balance for the native color temp of the stage lighting. In other words, what's "white" for that system? Whether they're using old school tungsten par cans and ellipsoidals or newer daylight LED fixtures, set your white balance for that. Every other color that shows up will be based on that color temperature.

If you have an unmanned second camera, I assume it's a locked wide shot. Manual focus, set to downstage center.

Learning to monitor exposure on the fly for live stage events just takes practice. Most of the concert video samples in your post were likely shot from a truck, and in that truck was a broadcast engineer who was shading the cameras remotely. When you don't have an engineer to back you up, you'll have to set a picture profile that raises your latitude (if possible) and keep on top of your camera. Generally, if your camera has enough dynamic range, exposing for a fully-lit stage at the top end leaves plenty of room below that for lower differences in lighting.

The wide camera especially, if unmanned, will need an exposure setting that has wiggle room. The closeup cams, manned, need to maintain exposure for the subject in the frame. If that means the exposure for the background is slightly off from the wide, so be it.
 
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I would set it to manual focus as best you can (hopefully there will be a rehearsal where you can test it out), auto focus may decide to focus on this you do not want. For exposure, this will sound silly, but I would expose for the brightest possible situation. I say this because you can adjust brightness and contrast for under exposed video to reveal some of the dark details much easier than you can for overexposed video. In my experience, once a video is so overexposed that it approaches white clipping, there is nothing that you can do.
 
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