bjohnson

Want To Fly In First Class On Your Next Gig? Here’s How!

2011-12-09T14:07:02Z

I just got back from a whirlwind cross-country trip for a freelance gig I’m working on. Between me, my field producer and my audio operator, we managed to boil down our equipment complement to six checked bags and three carry-ons. Now prices vary on different airlines, but the way it worked for me was this:

We flew USAirways from Cleveland to Phoenix, changing planes in Charlotte. When I got online to check us in the night before, I was resigned to paying $60 in checked bag fees for each of us ($25 for the first bag and $35 for the second, all meticulously packed and weighed to be less than 50 pounds.) However, in the middle of the check-in procedure, a pop-up box asked me if I would like to upgrade my entire party to first class - for $50 each. On USAirways, this upgrade includes TWO FREE CHECKED BAGS. (Bonus: They can then weigh up to 70 pounds.) In the time it took me to click the “yes” box, I had saved $30 overall and managed to get prime seating for the crew, and moved to the head of the boarding queue to guarantee overhead-compartment space for the two cameras and backpack-full-of-computers-and-iPad we were carrying onboard. I call that a bargain at twice the price!

Coming home at the end of the shoot from Tucson to Madison, I played the same game on United. Since both of those flights were on regional jets, first class was not offered, but once again the cost of checking two bags and first-call boarding was less than the cost of checking the bags alone. While it is easy to imagine scenarios where this technique may not work (e.g., first class is booked full) it is a trick that I will be trying every time I need to check bags from this day forward.

Got any travel tricks of your own you’d like to share? Let’s hear them!

REVIEW: Fast Forward Video Sidekick HD Recorder/Monitor

2011-12-09T13:11:52Z

PREFACE: The ProRes Dilemma

Let’s start this review off by dispelling a long-held rumor. I’m a PC guy, just always have been, and after reviewing just about every PC NLE at least once, I have settled on Adobe Premiere Pro (and the CS 5.5 suite) as my editor of choice. Not too long ago, I had a freelance client that absolutely insisted on Apple ProRes files for the output of a project. Unfortunately, Apple does not allow PCs to write ProRes files, and at the time PC’s couldn’t read them either.

Fast-forward a few months: Imagine my dismay as I walked the aisles of NAB 2011, looking at all kinds of new recording devices from Aja, Atomos, Sound Devices and others that promised long recording times and transfer speeds – yet the catch was: Only records in Apple ProRes.

So when I was offered the opportunity to review the Fast Forward Video Sidekick HD combination video recorder and camera-top monitor, I was distressed to think that I could shoot the footage, but couldn’t edit it. So I put the question to my colleagues on the Vidpro listserv – can PC Premiere Pro play back ProRes? My pal (and fellow Wisconsinite) Steve Oakley FTP’ed me a few Apple clips that seemed to work, so I went ahead and received the Sidekick HD. And I can now say with 100% certainty – Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 can play back Apple ProRes files, even happily combining them on the same timeline with just about any other type of clip you want to add – .AVI, .M2T, Photoshop files, Canon 50Mb, Sony 35Mb, After Effects comps, you name it. (The theory is that the ProRes playback capability came along with one of the many Quicktime updates Apple shoots out. Hey, who knew?)

Mounted on a Sony HDW-790 HDCam - mount not included

The Fast Forward Video Sidekick HD arrived in a fairly small box containing the Sidekick, a 120GB solid-state drive that acts as the recording and playback storage, a miniSATA-to-USB2 cable, a power supply and AC cord, and a manual that could more accurately be called a “pamphlet” (more on that later). I’ve been reviewing alternative recording devices for more than a decade now, and early on I realized the most important questions about any of these devices are “How do you mount it and how do you power it?” For the Sidekick HD, mounting is taken care of with a 1/4”-20 threaded hole on the bottom, suitable for screwing into any kind of arm, shoe-mount or other support with the right sized screw. However, no mount is included with the device. The unit feels solid, with a sturdy hard-plastic case, and even with the solid-state drive installed it weighs much less than one pound. The only power option included with the Sidekick is AC, via the power adapter that terminates in a 3-pin MiniXLR jack. If your camera has an Anton-Bauer battery mount with a D-tap, you can easily power the Sidekick from there (the cable runs about $100 on the street.) Other than that, you will likely be using the AC adapter, since there are no mount points on the back of the Sidekick for the common Sony, Panasonic or Canon batteries (Fast Forward Video makes mention of an accessory battery solution in the manual, but I have seen no mention of it anywhere on the Web.) If you do decide to experiment, the Sidekick can operate on voltages from 7 to 16VDC, so it might be a worthwhile task if you have a pile of batteries lying about.

I suppose there is a reason the manual is so sparse: Operating the Sidekick HD is pretty simple. The faceplate is adorned with a grand total of eight large buttons and a jog wheel; the power switch sits on the right side. HD-SDI loop connectivity is provided by two BNC jacks on the bottom; if you want to connect via HDMI, there are two mini-HDMI jacks on the left-hand side, along with the headphone jack and a 1/8” mini jack for line-level analog audio in. The Sidekick HD works best with embedded audio and time code; if your camera has that ability you can slave the recorder to rec-run time code on your camera, for one-button rolling and stopping. The Sidekick also records up to 8 channels of embedded audio; who would have ever thought that so much good stuff could flow down a single BNC cable? Of course, you should make sure that your chosen camera supports embedded audio and time code – my camera, the Canon XL-H1, does not. While this doesn’t stop the Sidekick HD from being useful, it does require the use of analog audio in, with an unbalanced stereo mini-plug jack on the side.

This makes for a pretty tenuous connection (same with the mini-HDMI loop connectors) with no built-in way to strain-relief it. Looks like gaffer’s tape or Velcro will be needed to hold those connections together securely.

Is TV Broken?

2011-12-07T14:32:39Z

I don’t generally re-post links to articles, but this one from CNN’s Business Insider Matt Rosoff caught my eye. Give it a read, but the thumbnail is this:

What is so flawed about the television watching experience that Steve Jobs devoted his final months of life to changing it? It’s a good, quick read. What do you think? Is TV broken?

Canon Cinema EOS C300: A Dissenting View

2011-11-07T06:56:01Z

I know, there have been a million opinions shot over the Internet over the last three days regarding canon’s new Cinema EOS C300 camera. About half point out it’s great feature set, and about half seem to point out every flaw it has in comparison to RED Epic. Whatever, all that’s fine. Me, I’m dissapointed for an entirely different reason:

Where’s the killer Canon camera for the tens - to hundreds-of-thousands of us that actually work in television? When I reviewed the Canon XF305 a year ago, I was very impressed with the package, with a few caveats - chief among them the 1/3” chipset. If Canon can jam a 35mm CMOS into the D5 mkII, why not the same hardware in a form-factor that a real TV production crew could easily use? And in a package that can sit on your shoulder?

When I got my invitation to the Canon press event, I was really excited. I even planned to fly from the Midwest to LA just to see the announcement. Luckily, I was offered some freelance work before I bought the plane ticket, but I watched for news on my smartphone in every bit of downtime. And when the news came out…what a letdown. The EOS C300 does nothing for me… and in fact, doesn’t seem to do much of anything for anybody until you outfit it with tens of thousands of dollars in accessories, including audio and timecode adapters, lenses, rails, grips, you name it.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I have to figure that there are many more video pros actually making a daily living than there are folks that will ever make money off their films. If I’m wrong, say so, but that’s the way I see it. I’ve used - and generally loved - Canon video cameras since the XL1 came out 13 years ago. Please, Canon, I beg you - put a 35mm chip, a good audio section, swappable lenses, the 50Mb codec, 10-bit HD-SDI out and SMPTE timecode in and out into a $10K shoulder-mount package. You’ll have a line flowing out the door for miles.

But in the meantime, I’m dismayed at the EOS C300. I guess I should be old enough by now not to get my hopes up so easily.

The One Collaboration I Need Adobe To Make

2011-09-07T15:35:31Z

Hey folks, been gone a while, but it’s fall and time to get back in the swing of things. One of the interesting side-effects of writing for PVC is that I am on just about every PR person’s mail list. Usually these missives are easy to toss to the side, but the other day I got one from Adobe, talking up their presence at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam (for the record, IBC is the international version of NAB, held in early September every year.) As a long-time Premiere Pro and CS-suite convert, I paid a little bit more attention to this one than average. Unfortunately, I neglected to save the URL, but the gist of it was this:

(Paraphrasing) ‘Adobe has had an incredible year, and we are at IBC showing products and working on collaborations with all kinds of other companies.’

Well, that’s cool, if a little vague. But what it did was to ping the bell in my head over the ONE thing I want with Premiere Pro that has so far eluded me:

I want an external fader box so I can stop mixing audio with a mouse or keyframes! Lots of other NLE’s have this ability, so why not Premiere Pro?

Believe me, the faders are out there - I make a pilgrimage to the JL Cooper booth at NAB every year to ask the question, and the “sorry, dude” reply is getting old.

It doesn’t have to be a full-blown audio board - just one nice, long-throw physical fader (that could be assigned to any track) would make me the happiest editor in my neighborhood. If I am missing a product that already does this, please let me know in the Comments section, but to the best of my research this beast doesn’t exist. Why? Why? WHY?

My claw-of-a-right-hand (after mixing with a mouse) salutes you in advance.

REVIEW: Litepanels Sola ENG LED Fresnel Light

2011-07-20T03:53:29Z

I’ve gone on record in the past as not being a big fan of camera-top lights. The last thing an interview subject needs is a glaring “sungun” to impart that “deer-in-the-headlights” look. Of course, sunguns of the past were crude tools, usually a low-to-medium wattage tungsten lightbulb that – if you were lucky – might be hiding behind a piece of bathroom opal glass. (If you are one of the six shooters in all the world that ever had an HMI sungun… good for you.) In almost every setup, the light was mounted directly above the lens, right on axis with the optics – a recipe for flat, unflattering light if ever there was one. And powering this device almost always required external batteries – anyone that has ever had a battery belt pull your pants down on a shoot, raise your hands now, please.

Wow, that many? Impressive.

About a decade ago, Litepanels came to the rescue of this sorry situation with the first practical LED-based sunguns.

The first models were long rectangles stuffed with around a hundred LEDs. A year or so after they came out, I managed to talk my chief engineer into buying two for our videography department, and slowly my attitude towards camera-top illumination began to shift. For one, the Litepanels were fully dimmable; they came with a swath of gels that slid onto the front of the light to adjust color temperature or add diffusion; if you had an Anton-Bauer battery plate, you could power them from the camera battery; and most important (to me) – they came with what is generically called an “Israeli arm,” a triple-jointed arm of varying length that could be loosened and tightened with one central knob. This one thing made it possible to get the light off of the center axis and provide some “modeling” – that is, cast shadows in a relatively controlled way to allow for 3-D objects, not flat like a sheet of paper. Finally, a way to get a little sparkle in the eye! Of course, it wasn’t all unicorns and glitter; for one thing, while the original Litepanel is really bright, for some reason it doesn’t have an awful lot of “punch” – that is to say, the light seems to fall off quickly. If only it had…a lens!

Fast-forward to the 2011 NAB Show. Now part of the Vitec Group, the Litepanels display featured just that – an LED sungun with a Fresnel lens, complete with a zoom control and a dimmer. No longer is the light in the rectangular shape of a king-size candy bar – the Sola ENG Fresnel looks just like a shrunken studio light. Of course, when you jettison a halogen bulb for a single LED emitter you lose two other annoyances, namely energy draw and heat. If the light isn’t hot, there’s no need to make the lamp housing out of metal – the Sola ENG is made out of plastic, weighs in at a svelte 15 ounces, and draws a maximum of 30 watts. Most of the kit fits snugly in a 6”x6” black nylon bag, including the light, a snap-on two-shutter barn door, several color correction gels and a small bag of mounting gear.

The Phantom Hum

2011-06-20T23:23:39Z

I do a certain amount of freelance work, mostly for friends that have businesses. Last weekend I started work on an instructional video for Exerstrider, makers of poles you use while walking that really ramps up the exercise value. We were plowing through the script at a rapid pace when…

...The Phantom Hum reared it’s ugly head.

I was using my basic rig, consisting of a Canon XL-H1 camera in HDV mode recording both to tape and a Focus Enhancements flash-card recorder, a Vinten Video6 tripod, a generic camera-top LED light for eye sparkle, and my Sennheiser EW100g2 wireless system. It was a bright overcast day, and even without any more light than the LED the pictures looked surprisingly good. We were halfway through a take when…something…didn’t…sound….right. Owing to the low-budget nature of the gig, I was doing my own audio, and the headphones - Sennheiser HD280 Pro’s, which I love - suddenly revealed a mid-level hum. I was running the camera off battery, and other than an Ikan monitor, nothing was powered by AC.

I did what you should do when presented with a puzzle like this: Start tracing the problem from one end to the other. I unplugged the headphones and plugged them back in again. Hum still there.

I unplugged the cable running to the wireless receiver and replaced it. Still humming.

I replaced the batteries in both the wireless receiver and transmitter. Still humming like a kazoo orchestra.

I was stumped. I stood beside the camera, scratching my head. Somehow in that time, my right arm brushed against the coiled part of the headphone cable…

...and the hum was gone. Take my arm away, the hum came back. If I grabbed the straight part of the cable, the hum remained, but by encircling the coiled part with my hand I could get it to go away. OK, monitoring problem. We soldiered on and managed to shoot the whole script before the weather went bad.

But the whole affair has been bugging me for two days now. The headphones have never been abused; I wasn’t stretching the cable in any way; everything was as it should be. And The Phantom Hum didn’t end up on the tape.

So I’m looking for advice. Have any of you ever had this happen? All theories appreciated.

Today The GoPro Let Me Down

2011-06-03T17:41:24Z

Regular readers of my mind-spillings might remember the Color-Correction Conundrum of a year ago, where I used the decidedly outdoor-color-balanced GoPro Hero HD as an accent camera for a choral concert in a church. The lemon-yellow footage of the piano keyboard was brought to heel by help from the readers of this blog, and since I had such success last time, I figured I’d do it again.

Actually, in the intervening year I bought yet another GoPro, so this time I gaffer-taped one camera to the edge of the piano keyboard and put the second on the top of a tall light stand facing backwards over the choir for a wideshot reverse. Both striking angles…but this time, when I went to recover the cameras after the concert, the piano camera displayed “SoS” in it’s viewfinder. Something had gone terribly wrong. The GoPro instructions mention that if “SoS” shows up, you must turn the camera off, then turn it on again, and the camera will (allegedly) repair the file. Well, after doing this dance, the file *was* repaired - but it was only about a minute long. In fact, the camera had crashed before the concert even began.

Live and learn, I guess. I still love the GoPro - in fact, I strapped the pair to the top of my ski helmet and went on a rollercoaster just the day before - but I’m thinking they may need a little more supervision than I originally believed. And it’s a really good thing I didn’t use that GoPro for the main rear-of-church wideshot I was contemplating!

Blackmagic Design at NAB 2011 Part 2

2011-05-04T03:37:24Z

The extended death of tape continues. Blackmagic Designs gives us a look at the Hyperdeck line. Again, the audio is pretty rough, but the info is good enough to share.

Blackmagic Design at NAB2011 Part 1

2011-05-04T03:31:51Z

Here’s a quick look at Blackmagic Davinci Resolve 8, including discussion of its new XML capabilities to ease the workflow with Final Cut Pro. A combination of a loud room and a hoarse throat doesn’t help the audio, but the info is good enough to share anyway. Enjoy!

PVC NAB 2011: Rotor Concepts

2011-04-17T02:00:46Z

The runaway popularity of the GoPro Hero camera has changed a lot of things. Here is a radio-controlled helicopter that would have been considered a toy not long ago that today actually holds some production promise.

PVC NAB 2011: Topaz Labs

2011-04-17T01:48:25Z

You know how hard you laughed when you watched “CSI” or any other cop show and the detective told the computer kid to “zoom in on that photo…and…enhance”? This demo might just give you pause. Great looking software, too.

PVC NAB 2011: Camlight Focusing LED Studio Lamp

2011-04-17T00:49:13Z

You find some of the most interesting things at the smaller booths at NAB. Here’s a new take on focusing an LED lamp from Camlight.

PVC NAB 2011: Arri L7T LED Fresnel Light

2011-04-16T22:08:27Z

Arri has been a leading name in production gear for almost 100 years. Now they are taking the next leap into LED fresnel lighting with the L7 series.

PVC NAB 2011: Mushroom Networks Teleporter

2011-04-16T21:50:53Z

Mushroom Networks offers live HD from anywhere you can make a phone call.