What’s the wrong NLE, you ask?  Well, obviously, it is the one all the other guys aren’t using.  Or, in a worst-case situation, the one your employer is using.

Full confession:  I just can’t cut on an Avid.  The whole layout, the interface, makes no sense to me.  None of my colleagues have this problem, and I know exactly why.  In the 1990’s, my shop was moving glacially towards non-linear editing, and at the time there was essentially one choice - Avid.  While we were still cutting 90% linearly, all my shooting buddies would occasionally get to dip their toe in the Avid pool.  Me?  I was shooting every week on a news wrapup program, and received scripts on Friday so close to air that there was no chance of digitizing, cutting, and managing output in the timespan I had to work in.  And I was happy that way; my linear editor - a Sony 910 in a three-Beta SP-deck A/B arrangement - and I knew each other so intimately that I never missed a deadline, routinely cutting 7-minute packages in (often) less than 3 hours.  It was like playing a piano to me - and much better than I can play a real piano.

But this doesn’t mean I had no NLE experience.  At the same time, I was writing for a certain two-letter video magazine, and in that process got to see lots of NLEs - all of them, essentially, except the Avid.  (Remember when Avid didn’t care about the low end?) I tried to sort the good from the bad and the bad from the terrible.  And there were lots of bad editors.  The best of the bunch each had their charms, but over time, I settled on the one NLE that made me as comfortable with it as I had been with the 910 - Adobe Premiere.  As I didn’t own a Mac, FCP wasn’t in the cards (although I did edit a 30 minute doc on it once - a fairly easy transition from Premiere), Vegas just didn’t have much structure in the interface, Edius made no sense at all, and anything with Pinnacle in the name just crashed time and time again.  So Premiere and I became great friends, and I find myself fast and creative on it like no other software.  And now that Premiere (OK, Pro) has finally become tightly enmeshed into the Creative Suite structure, jumping from it to Photoshop, After Effects, Encore DVD and other indispensable tools is just...simple.

Of course, the world can’t revolve around me; I have no illusions that my workplace will (or even should) switch from Avid to Premiere Pro.  But still, for me editing on Avid is like trying to talk English in deepest Mongolia.  I always hear about Avid’s vaunted media management, but all those bins, more bins and SuperBins just leave me cold.  A friend once opined that the Avid is a great database with a crappy interface, whereas Premiere Pro (and, in his example, FCP) are great interfaces fronting deficient databases.  Whatever.

I know Adobe is a big company, and I bet they are doing fine without any minuscule boosts from me.  What I can’t get past is the widespread idea that if someone isn’t editing on Avid (or FCP) then they aren’t editing...or worse, aren’t an Editor.  I can’t agree. In the final analysis, it should be all about the show, not how you got there.

In one of those little conversations you have on the floor at NAB, a knowledgeable person (who, of course, must remain anonymous) opined that 32 gigabyte SD cards will not only be available in less than a years time, but that by the time NAB2009 hits they will cost the princely sum of $5.

Imagine that, now.  A 63 minute DV tape is essentially 13Gb of digital storage, for around $5 on the street.  Solid-state non-volatile storage for about one-third of that cost?  This could be a real game changer.

Of course, all progress comes with downsides. Fellow PVCer Adam Wilt tells a story of the day he accidentally dropped a DV tape into a cup of tea.  That wasn’t really a problem in the days of Betacam, unless you drank your tea out of a bucket.  And DV had another downside which would be magnified in SD mass storage - tiny labels.  But in the whole, this could be a fairly easy solution to a very vexing problem - where do you store your projects when they are finished and you need the drive space for the next one?  Spinning discs?  Bah.  I have a stack of dead hard drives a foot tall in my shop.  DLT?  How 1990’s.  We need something better, and cheaper.  Could this be the breakthrough?

PS:  Of course, I faked the picture up there.  But you knew that - my Photoshop-Fu is only surpassed by the average 1st grader running MS Paint.

At one small booth off the main drag, Rescue Tape was being featured. Rescue Tape is non-sticky silicone wrapping, which boasts the remarkable ability to fuse into itself when you stretch it.  For example, if your radiator hose springs a leak on the way to a shoot, you wrap and stretch Rescue Tape around the split, and within minutes it forms a unified, one-piece repair.  I know, this sounds a little too much like the Photoshop Healing Brush come to life, but the demos in the booth showed it to be true.  Plus, it’s waterproof, insulates to 8000 volts, and doesn’t melt up to 500 degrees F.  It’s a must for every gaffer’s bag, and anyone else that might ever need a little help in a tough time.  It’s sold by all your favorite expendables vendors, or online at www.rescuetape.com .

One device is quite expensive and one is really inexpensive, but both have the potential to change their respective niches.

On the spendy side, I wandered through the Ikegami booth and saw what looked to be a DVD burner inside a box the size of two shoeboxes taped together.  The InPhase Tapestry holographic drive can store up to 300Gb on a DVD-sized disc, which is just what all the folks moving towards shooting on solid-state media need.  Better yet, InPhase is claiming the ability to extend storage capacity to 1.6 Terabytes per disc.  Now that would hold a lot of footage!  List price for the drive (when released) is in the $17,000 range, with no clue on what a disc will cost.  A quick Google-scan will reveal imminent-release press alerts going back as far as 2005, so let’s hope this is the year that long-term storage finally gets small.

The inexpensive choice from NAB 2007/8 has to be the Hoodman WristShot.  Looking a lot like a wrist splint, the WristShot is just the thing for handicams that won’t stand still on the end of your hand.  The WristShot clamps to your forearm with two form-fitting fiberglass shells, which are held in place with Velcro.  On the inside edge is a multi-articulated support that attaches to your camera via the tripod mount.  The camera support is adjustable up and down and in and out, to make up for differences in design from camera to camera.  Putting a camera on the WristShot makes good handheld work much easier with a Handycam, and I bet it would even go a long way towards curing the Sony EX-1’s legendary “tippiness” problem.  $199 at hoodmanusa.com.

The Federal Communications Commission decided over 30 years ago that we are not allowed to swear on the broadcast airwaves, in the “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say On TV” case that made George Carlin even more famous than he already was.  And if you don’t remember the seven words, they are:

Ha!  You didn’t think I was really going to go there, did you?  (Although over the last three decades several of the words have lost some of their punch.  If you really have to know what they are, go here. Gotta love Wikipedia.)

Anyway, CBS’ Andy Rooney weighed in on the obscenity question on last week’s “60 Minutes.” You can see his piece (or read the transcript) here. He comes down very solidly on the side of free speech, reacting negatively against the FCC deciding what can or can’t be said over the air.  However, he also points out that he doesn’t like obscenity, doesn’t use it, and would be happier if others didn’t either.

I never thought I’d be siding with Andy Rooney, no matter what kind of curmudgeon I usually am, but I think he’s 100% right here. Full disclosure:  I swear. I swear a lot.  You can’t have ever worked in commercial TV and not have developed both a sick sense of humor and a potty mouth.  But that doesn’t mean that I swear around my kids, or other people’s kids - I don’t.  Ever.  Still, I think it is the height of hypocracy to watch shows like “Project Runway” or other “reality” programs and hear bleep after bleep after bleep.  People know what is being said; I even think my kids have a pretty good idea of what is being said, and they are only 11 and 8 years old.  So what is the answer?

First of all, parents have to do their job - raising kids is a contact sport.  You decide what they will and won’t watch.  Second, I would be in favor of reinstating some concept of “family hours” on broadcast, where you could be assured of a “clean” experience.  Lastly, tell the censors to take a hike when it comes to more “adult” fare, and let Ice Cube fire off the F-bomb if the script calls for it.  I can assure you my kids aren’t watching “Law & Order,” so it won’t be a problem for them.  And it would behoove producers of shows like “Project Runway”, which I guarantee has a very large number of young girls watching, to tell the contestants to clean it up.  (Although the chances of that happening are roughly equivalent to a snowball’s chance in hell.  Oops, there I go again.)

The Supreme Court is soon to rule on whether “fleeting expletives” (like Bono exclaiming that winning a Golden Globe award is “f###$%g brilliant” - which is a lie, as well as a swear) are so heinous that every station that (accidentally) aired one should be fined $350,000 per transmitter, per incident.  Lots of stations out West have strings of dozens of translator stations, so a misplaced “$#!t” could clean out their bank accounts in a split infinitive.  Or maybe, just maybe, the Supremes could rule that a bad word here and there isn’t the end of the world, that adults can be adults, and kids access to more adult fare should be a family matter, not a government one.

What do you think?  I say not a chance in hell. 

Oops, there I go again!

From the article:

“Microtune said its private testing revealed “numerous and pronounced test failures” that could lead to “the loss of television reception in large areas of many metropolitan areas throughout the United States.”

Of course, it would be silly not to recognize that Microtune has an enormous financial stake in the DTV transition.  But still...what if they are right?  The tuners tested are all on the federally-approved list of DTV tuners (here’s a Wikipedia page with a chart of all of them.) The tested tuners have not (yet) been identified, and the NTIA has announced they will look at Microtune’s data.  But still, what is this?  Big problem three million in this transition?

I’ve said it a thousand times - I don’t think the DTV transition has been worth it, at all.  Agree?

Luckily for me, we arrived first.  Not long after, a crew from the Chicago bureau of a Big 3 broadcast network showed up as well.  Wanting to be a good neighbor (and forever cognizant that a resume’ from me might someday cross one of their desks,) I did my job in a quick, workmanlike manner.  I set up the interview in your typical lab, using soft, overcast daylight streaming in a window as my key, a 500 watt tungsten as my backlight, and a little fill.  The interviewee sat with a lab bench and racks of test tubes and such to his left, slicing diagonally across the frame.  A nice, casual setting for a nice, casual interview.  In about 15 minutes we were done, but I took the time to hang around and see what the big-city guys were going to do.

Can you say “Frankenstein?”

The big boys had actually engaged a grip truck for this gig, and by the time they were done lighting you’d think they were shooting a horror movie. Duvatine covered all the windows, obliterating any natural light.  Neon green fill covered the back wall.  Loud red-orange slashes sliced across the glassware.  The interviewee was lit in a way which could politely called “sinister.” All that was missing was a fog machine spewing over the desk and a Jacob’s Ladder snapping in the background.  In other words, they had created a visual image of what they thought Science looked like, and it wasn’t very positive.  And it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

I think about that shoot often, usually when I see stories on television about Science, because almost to a one they look exactly the same.  The lighting I described is a quick visual shorthand - it warns the viewer that:

a) Science is going on here;

and b) Science is DANGEROUS STUFF.

Please.  We’d do the world (and scientists) a favor if we didn’t make people instantly uncomfortable whenever actual thought is necessary.  From the research being done at the UW that day, a whole new branch of agribusiness grew, and so far I haven’t heard of any cloned cows growing to 50 feet tall or wreaking havoc on Tokyo.

Although...that might make a great horror movie!

Have you seen THIS?

Coincidence #1:  As I read this article, I was driving directly through the Michiana market that PBS affiliate WNIT serves, centered in Elkhart, IN.  Talk about your tough luck - to have both transmitter tubes on your analog transmitter blow up at once.  Any sane station manager would want to jump off the tower - transmitter tubes are very, VERY expensive pieces of gear.  Due to the eternal budget crises at PBS stations, WNIT’s management was forced into the decision to not repair their analog transmitters, which would in any event be turned off permanently 11 months from now, on February 17, 2009.  However, here we find a tiny ray of hope.  While you haven’t heard much about it on the viewer’s end until (seemingly) yesterday, in actuality the “digital TV transition” has been going on now for years.  WNIT - along with almost all other US TV stations - has been dual-broadcasting over both analog and digital airwaves for several years now. WNIT’s general manager, Mary Pruess, claims that “a large majority” of their over-the-air viewers have already made the move to digital reception (color me skeptical about that one, but let’s run with it for now.) But here’s where the lemonade cart shows up, to squeeze those lemons into juice:  WNIT has set up a hotline and Website to do what is possible to help their viewers make the digital leap.  One would have to believe that that’s going to be one busy phone.

To me, this is broadcasting at it’s best.  We can’t wait for the last possible second to reach out - and when I say “we,” I especially mean PBS stations, since the “antenna people” are overwhelmingly PBS viewers.  WNIT is taking disaster and using it to pull its viewers into the digital TV age, and hooray for them.  Other stations should learn from their example and get on the stick. 

Coincidence #2:  We pull into our home, unload the car, and start sorting through the accumulated mail.  What do I find?

My DTV Converter Box Coupons, worth $40 apiece towards DTV tuners.  Wanna help me spend them?

This won’t be a very long post, just a few links to the obituary of Walter Windsor, the general manager of WFTV at the time I got my start in broadcasting.  He died last week at the age of 89.  Here’s the obit, from the Orlando Sentinel:

http://tinyurl.com/2zjqdp

The reason I mention this is that I wrote an appreciation of Windsor in DV Magazine, way back in the late 1990’s.  Here’s a link to that article:

http://tinyurl.com/2ft3ac

No great insight here, other than the obvious: Television is much the poorer with the loss of people like Walter Windsor, who managed to keep the “show” in front of the “business” in local TV for decades.  Now it’s the other way around, and no amount of digital gear, focus groups or flat-screen TVs will change that, I fear.

...and this time it’s marshmallow guns.  How to make them isn’t important (although if you email me I’ll let you know.) What you do need to know is that you can get the parts for your marshmallow gun at almost any home center, and in this case we picked Home Depot.  So my brother and I are wandering the aisles in our usual slack-jawed mode, thinking “Wow, what I could make outta THAT,” when suddenly I see it - The Best Five Bucks You’ll Ever Spend.

Of course, this being a video blog, it better have a video focus, right?  Well, it does, and the subject this time is Cable Control.  The object in question is Velcro, specifically Velcro Brand Straps Reusable Ties.  If you have any cables to manage - and who among us doesn’t? - you know they have to be coiled up and secured, let we suffer the wrath of Tanglos, The Wrathful God Of Cable Tangling.  So, for five bucks you get 50 of these little beauties, eight inches long, and with a slot cut through each one so you can attach them to a cable for permanent residence.  Of course, since they are only Velcro-ed to themselves, that means you can remove and reuse them as well.  Eight inches isn’t long enough for every cable - no 500 foot Triax runs need apply, obviously - but for audio cables, reasonable coax runs, VGA, Firewire, you name it - they are the best.

In fact, I love these things so much that I’’ll give one to anyone that wants a sample, and no, I don’t own stock in Velcro.  Just be one of the first 50 people to send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to this address:

Velcro Giveaway
c/o Painted Post MultiMedia
PO Box 51
Madison WI 53701

and I’ll send back a happy little Velcro strap for you to test out.  And if you want to find them in your local hardware store, the UPC code number is 75967 90924.

Happy strapping!

This blurb ("article" would be gilding the lily) in the Hollywood Reporter points out that the 2008 Academy Awards telecast was the lowest-rated in history, down 25% in viewers in the 18-to-49 demo.  (Still, 32 million people watched; I’d love to have one-tenth of that number see anything I worked on.  And send me a dollar.  Each.) Explanations posited ideas from lowered promotional opportunities in the Writers-Strike-savaged TV season to no real crowd-pleasing movies in contention for Best Picture.  I’d have to lean towards the latter here; I saw “No Country For Old Men” a few weeks ago and, as much as I admire Joel and Ethan Coen and their work, this one makes their first film “Blood Simple” look like the Miley Cyrus 3-D concert flick.  It doesn’t get much darker than “No Country.” And I hear “There Will Be Blood” is not quite a laugh-a-minute either.

In any event, the whole no-one-is-watching thing made me think:  What’s at work here?  Awards show overload?  General cultural ennui?  Maybe Americans are growing out of our collective celebrity fixation?  Or do the movies just suck?  I have no answers; I sure hope you do.

Of course, maybe no one is watching this space either.

After college, I got my start at an ABC affiliate in Orlando, FL, as the lowest-of-the-low:  a studio crew member, at first tasked with making sure the several dozen individual pages of teleprompter copy rolled down the conveyor belt in order and on time (and yes, in the early 1980’s that’s what a teleprompter was - a conveyor belt running under a black&white camera.) Of course, this was at 6AM for the morning newsbriefs, so just keeping awake was an integral part of the job.  Studio camerawork soon followed.  I was blessed with a production manager that, for some unknown reason, liked me, so armed with little more than overweening eagerness, I quickly managed to move over to the field production unit, first as audio operator, and soon enough as a photographer.  At this point I had already, and unknowingly, jumped from one side of a fence to the other - from the camera operator that wears a headset and takes direction to the mad monk squadron that is the brotherhood (and, occasionally, sisterhood) of the ENG/EFP shooter.

It wasn’t till much later in my career that I realized these two groups rarely meet, or even have much to talk about.  Somehow I had managed to get on some freelance hiring lists for sports productions, and I really developed a taste for it.  Televised sports - and most live remote production - follows what I call the “5-S” approach - you “S"how up, you “S"et up, you “S"hoot the game, you “S"trike the gear, and you “S"plit.  If you have ever been involved in the editing of a documentary project that suffered revision after revision after revision, you’ll recognize immediately how appealing “5-S” production can be.  That’s not to denigrate single-camera, film-style production, which is what ENG/EFP shooting usually is.  (Of course, in ENG the script gets written after the shoot, in EFP it’s usually the reverse.) They are just two different techniques, with their own individual strengths and weaknesses.

Why am I going on about this now?  Well, my career has taken some interesting twists lately.  I have been put in charge of a Sony Anycast Station field production unit - a video switcher, audio mixer, graphics generator and monitoring system in a briefcase-sized box.  Basically, it’s a limited-use remote truck without the wheels.  At Wisconsin Public Television we’re using it (so far) to record lectures for air on one of our digital multicast channels, under the banner of “University Place.” Sometimes the content is great, compelling stuff; sometimes it ain’t, but there are several imperatives that must be delivered, and Job 1 is good audio.  My partner in this endeavor is Steve, a studio director of about the same vintage as me, but his field experience is almost entirely in the live-remote arena.  In that corner of the biz, you never go anywhere without scouting your location, so you know exactly what you are getting into.  I fully recognize this, but on the other hand, the ENG guy in me bangs his chest Tarzan-style and brays, “I never saw a situation I couldn’t shoot my way out of.” Ooops.

Turns out my quarter-century in broadcasting is not really the skill-set I call on most.  It’s the four years or so I spent playing in high-school rock bands.  All that time futzing with the PA systems - that no one else in the band wanted to decipher - is the most important experience I bring to bear.  If you have to use the audio from a venue that you don’t control, you better be able to figure out if there is an effects bus or some other output on the mixer you can adopt as your own, and you better do it fast.  Of course, if you had scouted the location first, you might have prevented that particular bit of pain, but what fun is that?  Where’s the tightrope?

Shocking revelation:  Tightropes are overrated.  My inner mad monk has come to learn that, while running and gunning is a perfectly valid way to do a tape package, knowing what you are getting into is a better plan of attack when there is more than one camera involved.  I find this dichotomy rather hard to bridge at times, but then, it’s not all about me.  It’s about the show.  So schedule that scout day - the show will thank you later.

The standard claim is that in a 500+-channel network, plus a Web full YouTube and other sources, everything you can get on PBS can be gotten other places.  This is so easily dispelled, its laughable.  Remember when Bravo was launched?  It was going to be all high-brow opera and dance and illuminating, uplifting programming. Hmmm.  “Project Runway” may be the highest level of “uplifting” on the entire channel, and that’s just because of the foundation garments (if you know what I mean.) Even Bravo’s website banner exclaims:

“Bravo TV Shows: Fashion, Comedy, Celebrity, and Real Estate Shows”

Where’d the opera go?  It went away many years ago.  I see little on Bravo that competes with Masterpiece (although I’ll always have to add the “Theater"), Nova, Frontline, or any of many other signature PBS programs.  Although maybe PBS ought to pick up some comedy....  but I digress.

Another set of stations that was poised to pick PBS’ pocket is the Discovery multiplex, including TLC (no longer called The Learning Channel, and for good reason, unless what you want to learn about is how to run a tattoo parlor.) To be fair, I think Discovery had been on quite a run of late, with Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs ranking among the very few number of programs I try to see on a regular basis.  Sadly, Discovery is showing signs of cannibalizing itself, rolling out so-pale-they’re-transparent clones in Smash Lab and Some Assembly Required.  And some would say that PBS took a page from Discovery’s playbook by trying out a “hip” series in History Detectives.  Was it interesting?  Kinda, but not enough to hold attention to any great extent.  And a quick run through all the channels available on your average cable system shows that these are just the good examples - even the History Channel has sunk to giving us (tonight) Star Wars Tech, History Of The Joke and UFO Hunters.  Wow, there’s some rabid scholarship there!

OK, let’s see what PBS is doing wrong.  Anyone out there seen “Wired Science”?  Anyone?  I’ve been reading Wired Magazine since issue #3, and while it isn’t always cutting-edge, there are usually at least a few nuggets worth considering.  The TV show has somehow managed to take the name of the magazine, some of it’s (garish) color scheme...and little else.  The tape packages are OK, workmanlike I guess you’d call them, and are usually video versions of stories in a recent paper issue.  These are surrounded by introductory studio host segments, and the studio segments are deadly dull.  And there is a LOT of time spent in the “Wired Science” studio.  Overall, it has the feel of a camel - a horse designed by a committee.  If this is what PBS is relying on the drag in the younger, “geekier” audience, they better try again.  (And watch out, magazine fans...a PBS version of “Make Magazine” is coming up next season.  I shudder in anticipation.  Not a good shudder, either.)

Of course, the other common rap on PBS is that it’s full of LIBERALS! Well, once you filter out (the extraordinary journalist, IMHO) Bill Moyers, and maybe David Brancaccio, the rest of PBS’ news offerings are incredibly centrist.  “The Newshour” never fails to have a perfect left-right split in their coverage or in their discussions.  Washington Week In Review does the same, recycling all the same talking heads you see on the cable news channels. Frontline does step on toes, to be sure, and bully for them, since no one else in the media even owns a pair of boots anymore.  (OK, Keith Olbermann is a pretty good toe-smasher at times.) If anything, I’d like to see PBS go farther, to be more serious, to balance a mainstream media drunk with pop-culture sensibilities on everything from Presidential politics (Another jumpsuit, Hillary?  Tsk, tsk) to, well, pop culture (insert obligatory Britney Spears joke here.) Of course, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.  I think.

Another thing PBS stations do not do enough of is to feature local production.  While local production funds can be hard to come by, I regularly hear stories of producers all across the country that have offered programming to their local PBS stations, just to be turned away.  Hey programmers:  Video production is cheap, and while not everything is going to be “Citizen Kane,” there are many people that would die a happy death if just once they saw their show run after the PBS logo at the top of the hour.  Heck, they might even pledge!

Last time I looked at the Times article, it had over 650 comments and replies.  I didn’t do a survey, but I sure hope that the reaction is tilting pro-PBS.  I’ve used this line many times before, and Joni Mitchell sings it better than I type it, but it is true:  “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” To lose PBS would be to lose a last voice of sanity, of reason, of thoughtfulness you just don’t seem to get on “American Gladiators.” Oops, I meant to type “Meet The Press,” but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Oh, by the way:  You don’t have to pay a cable or satellite company to get PBS.  It’s right out there in the air!  Amazing, isn’t it?