Bae usually has a couple mistakes in her performances, according to her. Whether they do "final recording" or actual live performances, it doesn't really matter, tbh. Recorded or not, the shit they do is impressive as fuck.
They clearly have a Concert Day and they structure the studio time around that. They actually don't have the time to do a bunch of retakes. Given the calibration/setup time, I imagine each Day of the Concert ate up all 3 studios that Cover has for the full day. It might have actually taken 3 full Studio Days to capture everything, plus everyone at some point had to do their segment of the group songs.
What they don't do is spend 2+ weeks fine tuning every detail of the render and audio. But they've clearly had more & more members at the sites for these events. Which has to have some reasoning, as a huge chunk were in New York for the concert. I.e. everyone that had an MC segment. So at least that stuff appears to now be done relative near the location/day of.
I think it's most likely that all the performances are recorded well in advance, but along the lines of this:
Sure, they'll do a retake if something catastrophic happens like they trip and fall down or completely forget a part, but I don't think they are recording over and over looking for the perfect run. I don't think any of the concert performances (outside of solo-lives) are live, isn't there always that cope that 'live' in Japan just means 'concert' and not 'live'?
It's really just a question of how much they're doing in Real-Time or near Real-time at this point. I don't think Cover will ever do an actually full "Live" event, but they seem to be working up to doing an actual real-time song or segment that isn't just an MC. I think they plan to keep expanding what they do at the events, and it has just become more noticeable that it isn't just them replaying a fully done concert from weeks before. They're expanding the Live part of "Live Production", it's just an interesting open question of where they plan to take it.
It clicked what they might be doing. They do the MC segments in the morning AT the venue. They can setup a fairly solid capture system that let's the members move around the stage itself. It makes the on-stage positioning far more natural, let's the talents being Idols on stage and let's them address any issues that might crop up in a full Real-Time capture.
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