João Leitão playing guitar in front of the fireplace in the Salão das Princesas, with the stone walls, the white doors and the seated audience in the foreground

Erro de Raccord on Berlenga

Three cameras, a dinghy and a fort in the middle of the sea

On 26 September 2026 we recorded the Erro de Raccord concert with three cameras in the Salão das Princesas, inside the fort on Berlenga. The next day we livestreamed the fort's closing concert.

29 September 2026Cláudio Contracampo

By day, the Salão das Princesas is a corridor for tourists. They come in through one door of the Fort of São João Baptista, on Berlenga, a small island off the Portuguese coast, look up at the red stone vault, the tiled dado and the fireplace, and leave through the other. Late in the afternoon of 26 September 2026, the room had thirty people sitting facing the fireplace and João Leitão with a guitar strapped on, presenting Erro de Raccord, his music project.

The concert was billed for half past six. Recording started a few minutes before eight, because the concert was free, with no fixed start time, and everyone waited for people to turn up. On Berlenga, clocks don't carry much authority.

From the boat to the dinghy

Bruno Amaral, who went out there to film it, is João's partner in these adventures. He has directed several of his music videos, and the two of them, he says, mix work with friendship. The weekend on the island was organised by the Associação dos Amigos da Berlenga, the Friends of Berlenga association, and the first idea was to take a phone, a laptop and whatever fitted in a backpack, because the only way onto Berlenga is by boat. Five days before, Bruno changed his mind and took agora's three Canon CR-N300 PTZ cameras, with their tripods, the switch that connects and powers them over the network cable, the vMix PC, two LED lights, a Scarlett interface and a Rode NTG microphone.

They left at 9:45, on a reasonably calm sea, carried courtesy of BerlengaTur. On the island, they moved the gear from the boat onto a dinghy by the buoy, and the dinghy took them to the fort's landing. From there up to the fort, the association's staff helped carry everything, under the watch of Sérgio Glória, its vice-president.

A camera on the fireplace

Bruno and João set everything up in the morning and early afternoon, taking their time, while tourists kept walking through the room. The stone gives back very little light, so they closed the shutters on the only window and switched on their own: a diffused LED in front of João and a battery one behind him, to lift him off the wall. With the window shut, the light stayed the same from the first song to the last.

After lunch, the screw on one of the tripods snapped and stayed stuck in the camera's thread, so the camera could no longer go on a tripod. Bruno set it on the fireplace ledge, facing the audience, and took the improvisation in his stride: "It was the only option, and it's the one we used." It's my favourite shot in the video, and the only one that shows the faces of the people listening.

João Leitão from behind, singing to the audience seated in armchairs, with the shuttered window in the background — The reverse shot, from the camera resting on the fireplace, with the audience and the shuttered window.

Recording the outputs, not the inputs

Bruno directed the concert live in vMix and refined the cut afterwards, in post-production, with each camera also recorded to its own file. There's a detail here that I think is the most useful thing in this article for anyone working with PTZ cameras. The CR-N300s send their picture over NDI|HX, and MultiCorder, the vMix tool that records one file per camera, doesn't accept HX sources. Bruno put each camera on a vMix output and had MultiCorder record the outputs instead of the inputs. All three files made it to the end of the concert intact.

The sound combines the voice and guitar, which came from the desk into the Scarlett, with the room ambience picked up by the Rode. The mix was refined afterwards too, and Bruno took the chance to give the picture a more cinematic feel with a colour grade to suit the moment.

João Leitão singing into the microphone in front of the stone wall, the same frame before and after the colour grade — The same frame as vMix recorded it and after the colour grade.

The same frame as vMix recorded it and after the colour grade.

The first thirty seconds of Ela é tão linda, with the song's caption.

At the end, João played a handful of covers by the Portuguese songwriters Jorge Palma, Fausto and Zeca Afonso, and the room sang along. "It was a really beautiful moment," Bruno confessed to me. It stayed out of the video, which was João presenting his Erro de Raccord project.

A c out of place

We also did the graphics: the title, the name of each song and the credits. In the title, the second c in "raccord" sits out of line with the first, from start to finish. Raccord is the film term for continuity between two shots, so an erro de raccord is a continuity error, and that c is one, put there on purpose.

The video's title, with the misaligned c.

The full concert and a cut of each song are on the Erro de Raccord YouTube channel, and the project is on Instagram.

Sunday, in the courtyard

The next day, the fort closed with a concert in the courtyard, several musicians playing in the sun under the stone arch. The gear was still on the island, and Bruno offered to stream it live on the Associação dos Amigos da Berlenga's Facebook page (in Portuguese). Internet reaches Berlenga by Starlink, and he plugged into the router with a cable. It came to an hour and twenty-five minutes of livestream, with three cameras.

The musicians from behind, playing in the fort's courtyard, with the stone arch, the red door and the audience in the sun in the background — The closing concert, in the fort's courtyard, on 27 September, in a shot from the livestream.

I asked Bruno what he would do differently if he went back. "I wouldn't change a thing, it all went well," he answered, without hesitating. He talks about the island and the fort with enthusiasm, "aesthetically, it's all incredible", but with his feet on the ground: "What weighs on you is the logistics. It's a remote island, and everything that gets there has to go by boat."