Working at the TFL

Updating from my PowerBook at the moment.Things are going well – concert edit wasn’t quite finished yesterday, so that’ll have to be finished Monday, being picked up Tuesday.  That’ll be an early morning I guess for the DVD build – luckily that doesn’t take too long. The Premier League Soccer Show edit will be more streamlined this time around, with Stefano editing his highlights into shorter clips.  Episode 2 has been rendered for YouTube, this time as four parts, and is ready for upload on Monday.  I might even put it up Sunday night while I work on the next episode.

The Missing tape still hasn’t turned up – and if it doesn’t I’m probably going to just waive my payment.  It is really bad – as a result though I have finally cleaned the office, and I’m working out a proper filing system so this can never happen again.  You live and learn, as they say.   And this has been a major learning experience for me – and one I dare not repeat. 

 

I’m also pretty sure I’ve secured the G5, which is good news.  The next big hurdle is my storage…The G4 I currently use is pumped full of IDE hard drives.  I use two together in a RAID configuration, one 400Gb partitioned with my boot volume, one 400Gb for storage of .dmg files, and one external FW400 250Gb for documents (including Final Cut Studio 2 docs).  The G5 I (may) have acquired has 2 75Gb Raptors – one of which will be perfect for my boot volume, but other than that I’m in a pickle.  The new drive bays are SATA (my drives are all PATA).  What I’m planning on doing at the moment is keeping a Raptor as the boot drive, buying a 400 or 500Gb SATA drive for the second bay, and putting a 400Gb PATA drive in the FW400 enclosure, giving me a total of almost 1Tb to work with whilst I work on paying off the computer and getting myself a new RAID.  I’m aiming to get a FireWire 800 RAID enclosure (although I’ve heard that the G5’s have a crippled 800 bus – 400 speed write, 800 speed read).  The upside is that the Taurus enclosure (that I’m looking to get) has FireWire 400 and 800 ports, so I could work on my PowerBook as well.  The downside (of course there is a downside) is that the enclosure uses SATA (which is better performance anyway) so my existing RAID is useless – meaning I’ll have to purchase new disks.  There is another FW800 RAID that I’ve seen called the miniG which uses PATA drives, but Australian resellers who carry them seem to be non-existant.  Its a real bugger.  I did find an eBay store that had the single disk miniG, so I am going to ask them if they can get a 2 disk miniG which will save me a considerable amount of moneys.  The performance of the 4 disk is no different to the 2 disk performance wise, unless I ran in a redundant mode, but that would require 4 identical HDDs which may cause some trouble, since I’d be back to square one – needing to buy a bunch of Hard Drives.Either way, the G5 will be armed with a 400Gb external, and potentially a second SATA 400Gb, plus my 10,000RPM boot drive, so I’ll at least be able to keep up with the Premier League football show and the occasional Funeral, etc that I do.  It’ll also be interesting to see whether the SATA 150 connection can make a 7200RPM drive perform as well as my PATA 100 RAID… I wouldn’t be suprised… Well, this is quite a full weekend nontheless.  

 

Supervising the football today til 3:30, working on a concert edit to be ready for Tuesday morning, Tasmanian Premier League Football Show to be edited by Monday evening, an unedited concert DVD to be made ready for Tuesday, a Funeral to be ready by Monday or Tuesday, and about three weddings to make duplicates of by Monday, a shoot at the Casino Sunday morning…*phew*  When I have a faster machine, it’ll all fit in nicely – but at the moment the rendering time is the real killer – and makes everything just that little bit more unmanageable unfortunately.I’d better get back to supervising and pressing my button.  

 

Still no word on the AV Tech position, but I have to talk to the people about it early next week, so will hopefully have some info – or better yet be able to reveal the position – and say that I got it!  

 

Justin 

Cleaned up and working hard…

That tape going missing has really hurt me in ways modern man may perhaps never understand. As a result I’m getting my act together, and I’m putting in 300% instead of the usual 200% I put into all my work.
I’m finally getting a concert edited that has been laying about for a long while now. I spent hours upon hours trying to work out why the XL2’s footage drifted out of sync…only to later find that I had stopped recording for a grand ten seconds sometime during the shoot. Talk about all time dumbest things to do when shooting 2-cameras. The show is good – but the colour is bad. Been colour correcting as much as I can as I go (not yet ready to attempt grading with Color.app) but I just can’t make the Panasonic match the Canon XL2 for sharpness and colour. The XL2 really does produce an amazing picture, it is just unfortunate that it is such an unbalanced camera – and that the stock lens is so weak. The glass in it is great, it is just the servo zoom and touchy focus that really cripple it. Especially when attempting a slow zoom with the rings, you get stepping, which is always upsetting. Plus the lens doesn’t have a manual Iris, and that always makes me upset. Yet more stepping, unless you’re one of those people that trusts ‘auto’ features. They have their place, but I try to avoid them whenever it is practical.
But the concert is coming out well. I think it is unfortunate where our cameras had to sit, and it really hurts the overall quality of the project (I feel), but ultimately you work with what you have. I’ll make this the best I can, and remember the lessons learned for next time. This is my second project for the client, and both times I’ve really wanted him to walk away with a high quality concert put together as a DVD package for him to sell, but both times there have been issues. Perhaps in this case the third will be the charm.
I should hopefully be able to work on the Blues Brothers project tonight as well. We filmed the bits of the car chase scene, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes from there. Hopefully there is nothing left to be done.
Saturday – monitoring the control room at Bellerieve Oval, then editing the Premier League Soccer Show. Didn’t get a chance to convert this week’s episode for YouTube yet, so will try to find time to do that tonight.

Justin

Long night…

Things started out well. Finished (hopefully) the Blues Brothers shooting, and the editing has to be done by the beginning of August (at the latest). That’s all good.
However, I got home and went to get to work on (yet) another project…only to find that one tape is missing. I have no idea how I’ve lost it, and I fear that I have put it in a ’safe’ place…my safe places always seem to be some kind of fearsome abyss from which light cannot even escape. I have been searching frantically for the tape tonight, but I do trust that it will turn up. There is virtually 0% chance that it is *lost* lost, but I do cringe at the possibility even existing.
I also filmed a musical production about a week ago now, experimenting with base instruments. The music was good. Our setup was simple enough – a Canon XL2 and my JVC GY-HD111E, both shooting in interlaced 16:9. I’m looking forward to this edit, since it’ll be basically my first actual 16:9 edit. The images looked pretty good – and our soundtrack is being professionally mastered which is also a bonus – my weakness when it comes to recording is still the soundtrack. Eventually I’ll get a pile of high quality microphones and some mixing equipment together…but for now I’ll have to make do with what I have.
Capturing video tonight – some duplication to be done tomorrow. Editing a concert tomorrow – one I did a while back. Very frustrating – the Long Play recorded with the Canon XL2 disagrees with Final Cut Pro, and seems to deviate by a few frames somewhere in there – and as a result is longer than my wide camera, resulting in a highly difficult and frustrating edit. Has to be done though, I’m almost out of options as to how to fix the footage, and I think cinema tools could fix it, but my working knowledge of Cinema Tools is extremely limited (I’ve opened and used it once to framerate conform a 60fps clip to 24fps).

Well, back to my search, and hopefully I’ll make some dinner in the meantime. I’d also like to capture the blues brothers footage, but I guess one step at a time…*phew*

Work on Episode 3 of Tasmanian Premier League Soccer Show commences on Saturday. I’ll probably cut up and render Episode 2 tonight ready for upload on Monday. When I have a newer computer this should all be much faster…at the moment just waiting on a response to my offer.

Alls well that ends well?

After a gruelling evening episode 2 is out the door (and I got a call to let me know it made the post – by mere minutes!). Problems problems problems! I never thought I’d ever have to say it – but 2Gb of RAM is kids stuff at the moment. My VM out is regularly at least twice as big as my in, my 2Gb RAM is all over the place, and worst of all – my CPUs are finally giving in on me. Sure, a render here and there is annoying but liveable – but converting a 15 minute video to uncompressed 8-bit in over 40 minutes? This is killing me…

Episode 2 is out the door however. I’m not happy with it – as far as I am concerned it is unfinished. The audio wasn’t normalised and so I am concerned that it will be up and down a bit. There are black frames in the final highlight clip where the video files had gaps between them, one transition reveals a score table before it has passed…argh! I’ve been at my computer basically non-stop all day yesterday and today working on this show, and it still wasn’t finished. And then when I write to tape – artefacts through all of the closing montage, and the audio went between clear and sounding badly compressed all the time. Frustrating, but in the end completely manageable. Whenever the going gets tough I like to think of what a less patient man would do – probably chuck it in and get all grumpy about it – and I put my nose back down and get back into it. In a way it reminds me of why I love what I do – and I get it done.

This has been good though, we’ve been able to use this episode to really look into how we have to work for next time. If all goes to plan, next time should be much more laid back and leisurely, and that can only be a good thing.

Still, seeing the weakest link in my chain, I have set in motion the wheels of the machine that should lead to my aquisition of a superior machine that will also help ease the workload a little, and really save me some stress!

It is sleep time now however.

J

Argh!

Deadline is ten minutes past – and still problems…the audio needs to be normalised, some levels don’t match, and worst of all the final highlights clip is pixellating all the way through! It is very visible, especially over the credits. Well, going to restart and see what I come up with. Oddly, the pixellation does not show up on the source files, but always in the same places via the firewire output. This is a disaster! Well…not quite…but it is still highly unpleasant. And I was looking forward to a quiet night in, with no work to do…ah wells *dreams*

Episode 1 is up and awa’!

Episode 1 Part 1

Episode 1 Part 2

Episode 1 Part 3

Episode 1 in its entirety. Time to notify the general public, and get back to work on Episode 2. *phew*

And again…

The initial YouTube render for the show was waaay too big (the second half clocked in at 200Mb!), so time to experiment with the CODEC some. Very frustrating. Episode 2 is going slowly, the interviews, the highlights, everything is conspiring against me. I’ll have to get a bit more ahead for next week’s episode.
Rendering the program overnight now. It has been broken down into three parts, and I have adjusted my CODEC to hopefully suit a bit better (I realised it was exporting at 30fps so dropped to 25, using a 320 x 240 motion JPEG codec with edge sharpening and progressive filters). I said that the show would be up Monday morning, so hopefully my computer can handle me uploading hundreds of megabytes to the internet whilst simultaneously rendering out motion graphics and allowing me to finish the edit.
There is much to do, but for now it is time for bed. Hard day looms over me for tomorrow…and I just realised that it is midnight…gee…it’ll be a long day tomorrow…

Captain disorganised…

I should have known better than to rely on things being easily located. Since moving things around in the office to help with my eyes, a few cables have gone missing, and we ended up with a bit of a drawn out disaster recording this week’s voice overs.
In much better news, our timeslot has increased to 15 minutes, which will encompass all our footage in total along with an ending highlights package and interviews. This episode is much more northern Tasmania centric, and we have three games in total being shown. The edit is hard, and filling out a certain space of time is a lot of effort.
We have also been given the go-ahead to upload episodes to YouTube, so each episode will go up in two parts, and will be available each Monday, after the show has aired on Thursday. These will be public, and we’re hoping that it will extend the reach of the audience, and could result in better sponsor support.

Back to the edit, a lot of work needs to be done by tomorrow.

J

Premier Leagueing it up

Editing my highlights grabs for the Premier League Football Show. I’m damn glad we took time codes, this is saving me a whole heap of time. Walter is getting here at approximately 4:45 to record his voice over, and then I’ll apply all the finishing magic to the edit and hopefully fix up some of the things I wasn’t happy with (transition sfx, a couple of out-of-time elements, repetitive music).
Once Episode 2 has been pushed out the door, I’ll get Episode 1 and 2 rendered and uploaded to YouTube for people without Pay TV to view. I’ll have to leave it until a few days after the show as they are paying for that air time. Episodes will go up in halves I think, that’ll allow us the highest possible quality (with the CODEC I am using).
Timecodes are all laid down now – time to get stuck into the edit.

J

Back from Blues Brothers shoot night two…

Well, so passes another evening’s shooting. I used my rain cover for the first time, and I guess that made it worth the $220 I paid for it. The batteries are holding out well, as I discovered both at the Funeral and with this Blues Brothers work, so maybe the IDX system isn’t an absolute necessity at the moment.
The shoot went well. Stefano wasn’t able to be there due to a funeral he was shooting on the Eastern Shore. The Tasman Bridge was closed today, and so he wasn’t able to make it in time. The shoot went well again in theory, although there is one shot that I wont be happy with until I’ve double checked everything. I am unable to capture the footage tonight thanks to duplication duties, but the sooner that is done the better in my opinion.
Still being pressured to upgrade the computer, so I’m still trying to arrange any kind of finance to get the G5. If I can get it, to prevent all my IDE HDDs going redundant, I’ll grab a PCI RAID card and RAID ‘em all together. Two 300Gb drives and two 400Gb drives will at least make me a 1.2Tb RAID, which is gonna beat the pants off what I’ve currently got, performance-wise. I could store everything on it in the way of work assets (and even the Final Cut Studio 2 templates) and avoid getting any kind of dropped frame errors based on disk speed.

I am thinking that I need business cards. Do I go with CD-R business cards with a video demo on, or do I go with the infinitely more portable plain ol’ paper ones? CD-R ones would make me seem much more hi-tech…I guess its just a decision to make when I get some moneys together.