Vision Mixers and Low Budget AV = FAIL

I’ve been on the lookout for a long time for a vision mixer. For a while there, I thought I’d pick up a second hand Panasonic MX 12 cheap, but when I thought about it realistically, what practical purpose did a 2 channel vision mixer really offer?. Clearly a 4 channel was the minimum I should be looking at or else I was going to see my investment cascade into redundancy faster than analogue video when DVD debuted.

Getting a VTR, looking at a Dolly

Well, its official, I’ve got one of these on order, finally replacing that single-chip camera I use for acquisition. It’ll certainly look the part, and has real time mini DV and HDD recording (simultaneously), as well as a DVD burner and a real-time MPEG-2 encoder. It has firewire out, so I’ll be able to use it with Final Cut Pro.

Falls Festival 2.0

Its looking very much like I’ll be crewing for Falls again this year, which is a very exciting prospect. I think if we can get some of the same team we had before back together, we could really make this year shine well way above our effort last year.

The JVC GY-HD Series cameras – An In-depth Guide in two parts – Part 1: The Physical Camera and connections

Basically, I’ve just realised that I spent ages looking for good info regarding these cameras, and could hardly find anything. I ended up resorting to downloading the manual, but that still only addressed half of my questions, so here I am going to write about the JVC GY-HD111E (much of what is said here will be applicable to the GY-HD101, 201 and 251).

I’ll make a post here on the physical nature of the camera and accessories, and then I’ll do an article on recording formats, the camera firmware and post production workflows.

If you see any mistakes, or I’ve missed anything you want clarification on, please email me.

Alright, Falls is over

And honestly, it was one of the best gigs I’ve ever worked on. Seriously, it was some long hours, but with some stamina backing us up, we kept at it.