Hot days into hot nights

The Round Earth Project is almost finished, they are expecting delivery Monday, previewing Wednesday and opening Thursday. If you’re in Hobart, get along to the Peacock for an ‘alternative’ view of Shakespeare’s King Lear, as told from the King’s perspective during the third act.
I’m currently working on a great knowledge article, outlining pretty much every scrap of information I wanted to know when considering buying the JVC GY-HD111E, and every bit of knowledge I searched for after. It will handle things such as the curious use of HDV-SD (and moreso, what doesn’t support the virtually unheard of format), lens sizes, attachments, features, control and handling, etc. Very in depth, want to leave no stone unturned.

Cricket over, back to the hard slog

Finally…the cricket is done with for another bit of time.

Five days of Australia and Sri Lanka, supervising the LED screens. Nothing happened, of course, and I spent most of my time sitting and chatting with people.
Starting to think about having my own website made. Getting my online presence happening in a real way. Have to start working not only for others, but for myself. My skills are becoming quite marketable I think, especially as I gear up. I’m moving away (finally) from just being a bloke with a camera and a computer and getting proper, professional gear. Stuff I’m grabbing short term (by the end of summer I hope) are a broadcast monitor, a co-processing card, an IDX battery and light system, a wide angle lens and a bigger tele lens. Gotta get some gear now for the cricket too – we’ll be covering some of the games multi-camera, and we’ll need decent gear to do it – my boss would rather not do a half assed job of it.
The IDX system will be a huge help for Falls, two V-loc batteries running at around 4+ hours each. Actually, it will be the best investment I’ll have made since getting my camera. The next big thing will be a Hard Drive, but at $3000 for a 100Gb drive, that’s still a ways off. Maybe I’ll get another loan if I can cover it…maybe it’ll be more worth it to just buy it outright actually, now I think about it…
Sony has released two new cameras recently which has put them back on my radar. After that disappointing 1/2″ jobby which would have had great pic quality all wrapped up in a poor and difficult to use design, Sony have released two new 1/3″ CMOS HD cameras. One in that same ‘wannabe handheld barrel camera’ design which looks like it’ll be awful, and one with a very boxy but practical shoulder mounted design. The shoulder mounted one looks like it offers basically the same features as the JVC GY-HDXXX series, only with “1080p” (should I say 1440×1080 and whatever weird progressive system they’re using), but the biggest benefits? Removable lenses (which is just a total must-have for me now) and recording to MiniDV AND Compact Flash. That’s a biggy, and very nice. Come on JVC, bring us a camera with CF or SSD or P2 or anything! Keep the tape though, don’t want one in lieu of the other. I’m still not interested in 1080p aquisition a whole bunch, and even less now that I found out that the recent Australian feature film Gabriel was shot entirely on the GY-HD101E, meaning 720P is ok for cinema.
A lot of editing work lately too, and admittedly more to come from the way things are panning out this summer. During next year ideally I’d like to get a ProHD tape deck, a 30″ LCD panel (2560×1600), a robotic duplicator, dual quad core CPUs for my Mac Pro and maybe a second JVC HD camera (if I can find one cheap). They come up from time to time, so it may be worth investing in. Otherwise, I’ll be paying off my loan and getting a second camera regardless, although I’m going to go for the big boy next time – the JVC GY-HD251E. HD-SDI and 60fps HD progressive capture. I want to see a 1440×1080 HDV camera offer that!

Its hot, and I have some leisure time to take advantage of before I begin working again tomorrow.

J

New features!

Working at the cricket currently – international test match, Sri Lanka vs Australia, been too busy at home to post, been to busy at work to post. Irregardless, here’s a new feature of this site. If you type in innebateav.com then it directs you to this site! Cool, huh? I’m thinking I will get some hosting and a site proper made up, currently trying to make google apps work, but I cant change my cname info. I’ll work it out tomorrow. Once that is fixed up, I will also have an InneBateAV email address. Woohoo!

Too bad I couldn’t register IBAV, someone else had parked on that one. Fiends!

Justin

Of questions and answers

I was asked yesterday why I would want/need the card I mentioned yesterday. I guess I should touch on the benefits such a card would bring, because I think this is a very important part of any editing system and should not be overlooked.

The purpose of a video co-processing card is – for want of better description – to co-process video. These cards usually offer additional, video specific rendering to many applications. In my case, the card would allow more real-time effects in Final Cut Pro, speedier application of filters in Photoshop, and most important of all – broadcast quality live output of anything I was working on. A co-processing card usually features several types of input and output, which allows it to capture video from many analogue sources (in the case of the card I want, 1080i, 720P, PAL/NTSC SD, SDI and HD SDI). The outputs are for live, uninterrupted monitoring. For example, in Final Cut Pro, it will show what I’m working on, on any broadcast screen or TV you use for the output, at full resolution and framerate with no interface elements getting in the way of the picture. This also allows for a fine view of the detail without messing around with different settings, and in the case of Final Cut Pro, often your editing windows wont display at the full resolution of whatever you’re working on.
Even more important (I think) than that, is real time monitoring of DVD Studio Pro and Motion. This will give a live preview of menus, graphics, everything, as they will appear on a Television. The vital importance of this is – of course – text may appear fine on your computer monitor, but will come out blurry and crap on a TV, especially an older, interlaced tube.
As I mentioned in my last post, the card would have saved me hours and hours of work. I can elaborate further – due to our foolish handling of my JVC GY-HD111E (we were both in a rush and short on tape, so the lead in times for shots were exceptionally short), I had to manually go through the footage we had and timecode and individually log and capture every clip the director/editor wanted. This was made further more difficult by the fact that I was the only person who had a ProHD HDV type-1 capable camera and the entire movie was shot in HDV 720p24. When just capturing the tape straight into Final Cut, there was a five-second pause on every scene break (because of the MPEG2 data stream I’m guessing), meaning many scenes were missing their beginning, or in some cases, entirely missing altogether.
Had I had the ability to capture via analogue HD component, I could have run the tape, and every pixel that was played back through the camera would have been recorded, without a second dropped. There may have been some loss of quality, but if so, it would have been extremely minimal. I could have pressed play and walked away. Instead I spent hours upon grueling hours watching and stopping and reviewing and writing, only to repeat the process somewhat in reverse for the ingest.
The other big selling point on the card is – a straight analogue capture card is about $500. That’ll give me component HD and HDMI (w00t). The co-processor is just shy of $1400, does a lot more stuff, supports more things, and is on my to-get list anyways. An analogue capture card would go largely unused, and when I finally got my co-processor (I’d prefer a Kona 3 but beggars can’t be choosers) it would be effectively obsolete.
Well, there’s a horribly convoluted, badly put together reasoning. I can’t afford either of those things anyways, but that’s all irrelevant. In other news, the bodybuilding edit is finished (I think…for the third time) and the DVD uses some advanced techniques I may discuss in a later post. Amazingly, my Mac Pro took over ten hours to render to MPEG2, which is about seven hours than the longest MPEG2 render its ever done. It was a bit scary. My Mac Pro is seriously letting me know it needs more RAM, and is very angry about it. 10.5 isn’t giving me any issues at all (except with Adobe Photoshop CS3). Round Earth project should be nearing completion shortly. Nigel Hope liked his DVD, I’m glad, I was really happy with the shoot and edit (for his show ‘Bass Jump 3: The Final Frontier’). Got dance shows coming up – large amounts of duplication. I’m seriously thinking I need to get a DVD publisher of some description…

Justin

I’m still alive…I think…

Although I’m in no-way implying that I have a life.

Everything has gotten pretty mad around here. I’m actually working so much that stopping off to post here is pretty much impossible.

Cricket has started, Tasmania are hammering away (much like they did last year) and are already on the top of the ladder. But I don’t go to watch the game. I’m working with a servo controller on the Canon XL2, which really makes a difference. I still feel a bit uncomfortable because I can’t be as fast with it, but otherwise I’m very happy with being able to sit as I work. Games of cricket make for exceptionally long days of nothing.
We’re also currently exploring new replay systems over at the oval, the current analogue system is a bit of a waste of a $20,000 tape deck, and very clumsy, and the computer based one is pretty much rubbish – no playback speed control, formats keep changing, and all video goes through a network (which chokes since it seems to like to record in 10-bit uncompressed SD).
Otherwise, Soccer is well and truly over, although I haven’t had time to upload any more episodes, or start work on the end of year DVD. That’s getting close too…its making me a bit uncomfortable.
Have just finished an edit of the IFBB Tasmanian Bodybuilding Championships, currently working on the cover. Using Adobe Photoshop CS3, and getting used to its newer interface (although still admittedly much the same) is taking some time. Steadily catching up on the work, its hard but this is the best time of year for it. Plus, the cash is great.
Working at the Falls Festival this year too, not sure if I’ve mentioned it before…its been so long since I posted. I’ll be camera on-stage on one of the stages. Long, long days (seventeen hours or something) but the pay is good and we’re getting fed.
Considering getting one of these to complete my editing system. Capable of SDI inputs, and with HD component in and out, it means I would be able to have a live broadcast monitor on hand, and my three display system would really be working for me then. Plus the additional RT in Final Cut Pro wouldn’t go astray. Only recently would the analogue HD inputs of this card have saved me over five hours of grueling work, so it is looking to be a must-have.

Anyhow, I need to finish the cover, labels and menus of this bodybuilding, probably will be 100 discs to burn over the next day or so, and then there’s the dance show I’m working on, which will need 200 discs! Its pretty straightforward work, but duplication on that scale really makes a difference!

J