I pulled a short editing gig recently that has me fixing someone else’s amateur mistakes. Based on the many comments regarding my frustrations over not being paid properly from my “What Price Pro for Hire” post, I found that many producers feel they have also been unfairly and improperly paid. They had good advice and suggestions on how they dealt with possible clients that didn’t want to pay for the value of a good product. It’s nice to know I’m not alone, yet, isn’t it so frustrating to realize so few understand the amount of work that goes into even the most simple production? Our elusive skills really are comprised of smoke and mirrors!

I always tell people video creation requires both right-side and left-side brain activity: one side for the artistic and creative, the other for the problem solving and technical details. Aren’t we special?

So, what was my “fix”? It was so simple; I almost didn’t want to take their money! They made three mistakes: the first one had multiple cuts of the on-camera talent bumped back-to-back without any B-roll to cover the jump cuts. These cuts also were very tight together, so the talent appeared not to breathe between takes. The third amateur error was full of the talent on scene saying “um..” and “ah.”. So, I just took out those “audible pauses”, added room tone in their place, and put some B-roll bridging the jump cuts together and gave the too-tight shots some breathing room. A 45-minute piece that took me about 2 hours to fix. They loved it. Said I was magical.

I’d love to hear how other magical producers impressed their clients with easy tricks of the trade. Care to share?

Once again traveling the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, at NAB we made a bee line for the camcorder manufacturers to see what was available in the low end of the broadcast range.

JVC was showing off it’s new ProHD solid state GY HM-100 and GY HM-700 camcorders, that record to SDHC cards in native Quicktime format. Both models record in almost every flavor of HD video, 1080i, 1080p, 720p at various NTSC and PAL compatible frame rates. The codec used is 35Mbps MPEG-2

JVC promised to get us a review unit of the hand held GY-HM 100 as soon as they’re off the assembly lines in a few weeks. The GY HM-100 is available within a few weeks at a price point of $3,995, and the HM-700 is on sale now for $7,995.

Panansonic announced a hand-held pro model, the HMC 40. This new small format camcorder also records to SDHC cards, but belongs to the AVCCAM line, meaning it records in AVCHD. The camcorder comes with 3, 1/4 inch CMOS sensors, with a maximum bit rate of 24Mbps.

The HMC 40 will be released in August with a suggested price of $3,195. We’re also keen to take a look at it here in the offices, as we really liked their HMC-150 in the same AVCCAM family.

Canon was there showing off some new broadcast lenses, but no updates to their camcorder line were there, unless you include the Canon 5D mark II DSLR, which they showed tricked out in their booth alongside their camcorders.

There were a lot of accessories for this DLSR, including follow focus systems, rails, viewfinders and various audio attachments. There’s no doubt that the DSLR as video camera is here to stay as a category. We’ve got our Canon on 5D mark II on the test bench now.

Sony didn’t have much in the way of new announcements this year, but one thing that did catch our eye, was the HXRMC1, POV camera. It’s essentially an AVCHD camcorder with the lens detached and conntected to the camcorder by a 9 foot cable. There’s all sorts of uses as a second camera with such versatility.

The camera shoots 1080i AVCHD to Memory Stick, and includes a 10x zoom lens, and weighs only 1lb. 1oz, making it possible to stick anywhere. Uses include work as a helmet-cam, or mounted on a boom pole for some extreme POV shots.

Well, another NAB show came and went, and every-one’s favorite video magazine was there to take stock of the industry and report on new and exciting equipment coming your way this year.

One of the first things I noticed was that 3d production was everywhere this year. It seemed that whichever booth you were in, there were people huddled around LCD panels with funny glasses on (Quick stock tip: find the name of the company that makes those polarized glasses).

I have to say I was a bit underwhelmed by 3d. Unlike HD video, (which also had it’s coming out party at NAB) I can’t feel the same sense of excitement and possibility for 3d. It still seemed very gimmiky and made it hard to suspend your disbelief, in addition to causing eye strain. However time will improve the technology hopefully. As it stands it seemed to me that instead of true 3d, you had a series of 2D planes in a 3d space. I’m not sure if the convergence was tuned right, but in almost all instances you simply had a foreground plane, a medium plane, and a background plane, instead of a smooth gradation of depth from foreground to background.

Panasonic, Sony, and JVC were all showing off 3D displays, and work is going on to develop a 3d standard for the home, in addition to your local cinema.

Wednesday, April 22, is the 39th annual Earth Day awareness celebration.

Back in 1970, when the sandal-wearing free-spirit hippie types first started this grass-roots celebration, I think people sort of laughed about it, but the era was a turbulent one with wars in the East, gas prices out of control, and rolling blackouts across the country.

Many people forgot about the conservation effort during the decadent 80s and 90s, and here we are again facing the same issues. Was it Santa Ana who said something like if we don’t learn from our mistakes we’re destined to repeat them?

Back in 1970, to commemorate the first  Earth Day, my old high school graduating class proudly labored in the hot sun for a week turning a slab of dry dead turf  into a cool eco-garden complete with algae, frogs, and various living organisms. When I went back for my 20-year reunion, that eco-garden had been cemented over. A testimony to the 1990s.

Little did we know in the 1970s how much we would depend on our electronics to get by every day in this new century. Today, we’ve become quite aware of energy conservation again and how much energy we waste.

But we video producers understand this as we  are a power hungry sort… we are always pulling power from some source for our myriad of gadgets, machines, and devices. In honor of the upcoming Earth Day, here are a few tips to help save and conserve sent to us from Greg Spector and Retrevo: Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a trend in camcorder design lately to eliminate the traditional viewfinder in favor of the LCD panel (such as the Canon HFS-100). And in my opinion it’s good riddance.

I’m going to probably break with most of my professional camera op brethren here, but I’ve become a complete convert to operating the camcorder using the LCD screen. I rarely bother to squint into the viewfinder anymore and these are the reasons:

I wear glasses. I know that all viewfinders have a diopter control that will compensate for my less than stellar vision, but it’s annoying to have to raise my glasses up and down constantly to check both the camera and the real life set.

Having one eye closed all the time is annoying, and takes a while to re-compensate to the real world environment. When seconds count, being able to take your head out from behind the camera and being aware of your surroundings makes it much more likely you will be able to capture what’s about to happen, rather than what’s in frame right now.

The resolutions of viewfinder screens are generally awful. In the SD days, you could still focus reliably using the viewfinder. But with today’s HD resolutions you still have to use all the focusing tools such as peaking and image magnification in order to get an acceptable focus. So what’s the point? Why not use the much larger, and (more likely higher resolution) LCD panel?

I haven’t seen a really good viewfinder since they were mini tube tv’s anyway. Film cameras are totally different, looking through the viewfinder to a nice piece of ground glass, is amazingly sharp and detailed. Looking through a plastic tube into a tiny LCD panel is just disappointing.

I know that the biggest obstacle is shooting outdoors in bright light, and that the LCD panel gets washed out very easy on a bright day. But they are getting better in this regard, some cameras such as Sony’s EX-1 actually use the sunlight, and optically direct it behind the screen to increase brightness.

That’s still the only drawback I can find, and one that’s easily worked around simply by shading the screen with your hand in most cases.

So what about you, so you still find viewfinders useful?

Youtube, is the the second biggest search engine in the world. The reason behind Google‘s  huge $1.65 bn purchase, was that the media giant thought that they could rake in the bejamins, by selling advertising through popular videos on the site. Well according to Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang, the video site is due to lose $470m this year! That is a HUGE loss, even for Google. The reason?

The problem as he sees it is an inability to sell advertising on most of its pages, coupled with a huge number of users watching a vast amount of video online. Which makes marketing hard since there are so many new videos being uploaded everyday, the incremental cost of every user is actually really high. So this means that having a viral video is actually bad for advertisers!