LIGHTWORKS Brings LED ZEPPELIN's 'Celebration Day' To Life

With over 20 million people eager to get their hands on tickets to their first headline show in 27 years, LED ZEPPELIN's 2007 London concert was one of the hottest events on the planet. The release of the live concert film "Celebration Day" on November 19 gives those millions who missed out the chance to experience the performance in all its glory.

Legendary music filmmaker Dick Carruthers once again turned to his editor of choice, Henry Stein, to help bring the film to life. The pair has worked together on a long and illustrious list of music projects, including 2003's "Led Zeppelin" DVD — the biggest-selling music DVD of all time — with Henry Stein using Lightworks exclusively to edit each and every one of these explosive live performances.

Stein explained why Lightworks is the best tool for the job. He said: "With any multi-camera project, you need a solid, stable and fast system, and Lightworks is certainly that. 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 dear friend and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun have had to wait five long years. But, as is often the case with LED ZEPPELIN, they 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 different.

"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."

The latest version of Lightworks for Windows is available to download for free at www.lwks.com, with an upgrade to the Pro version available for only £40/€50/$60 per year, with Linux and Mac versions soon to be released.

"Celebration Day" will be available in multiple video and audio formats on November 19 from Swan Song/Atlantic Records.